Lockdown 2020 - The Academy doesn’t stop

The Ravenna Academy of Fine Arts, an institution that has marked the cultural and artistic life of the city and still continues to characterize it.

The exhibition of the students of the course of "engraving techniques" of the Academy of Fine Arts of Ravenna presents itself to the visitor as a privileged moment for a verification of the research activity that this art involves. A specialized laboratory in this Academy which offers and continues to offer expressions of sophisticated creativity with its history and tradition of well-known artist teachers; over the time it still maintain the mark of a recognized preciousness and has rich opportunities for experiences in its specific experimental laboratory. The works presented are the result of teaching that has never stopped, despite the lockdown period, giving a signal of an undoubted maturity achieved, also thanks to the quality of the teaching of prof. Agim Sako and the commitment of the students in applying and expressing the best they have been able to give in the context of this complex and fascinating discipline.

The exhibition of the works will be hosted in the space of the Pallavicini 22 Art Gallery with the collaboration of Claudia Agrioli. This reaffirms a fruitful synergy that has been in place for some time between the Academy, public and private institutions and places in the city, and also confirms the joint will of intent in offering new opportunities to ongoing research.

For young students, exhibiting their work is at least as important as the preparation they have received, and exhibiting their works publicly is a further opportunity to verify their communicative consistency and their artistic validity, which is indispensable for anyone entering the world of art.

Not marginal, not collateral but fundamental becomes for the students the experience of the engraving workshop where the meeting between contemporary poetics and the ancient complex technique of chalcography is determined. The teaching of engraving techniques is aimed at learning a method of expression that makes use of technical, cultural and historical knowledge, but which takes the form of assiduous individual operational practice.

In a field that is by its very nature complex and constantly over the top like Art, an activity that does not and cannot fall within the terms of the "normal" everyday planning, the question of the Academies is proposed today throughout its disruptive artistic evidence, opening up to exchanges with contiguous sectors and activities, and proposing an elasticity of interpretation of creativity capable of articulating itself on differentiated intervention spectra. With all the troubles that have crossed their history, within the Academies they continue to produce with great intensity, and indeed, perhaps due to the particular type of relationship that is created between teachers and students, they are transformed into forges of capable talents able to dissolve even within different sectors. An institution that has not established a standardizing school but rather a resource to enter a different expressive world for each one, with enormous potential where art is the promoter of new

Paola Babini
Didactic Coordinator
Ravenna Academy of Fine Arts