Felice@Madre

"Felice@Madre" is a project promoted by Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee in collaboration with GRIDAS - Gruppo Risveglio dal Sonno (“Group for the Awakening from the Sleep”), an association active from 1981 in the Scampia district, in the Northern Naples area. At the Madre museum is presented a selection of the works created by GRIDAS and by its co-founder, Felice Pignataro: depicted canvases, sculptures made with recycled materials, self printed posters, paper-masks and polyurethane foam masks – like the statue of “San Ghetto Martyr, Protector of the Suburbs” – that give back the sense of an art in continuous confrontation with the events that have highlighted, from a social and cultural point of view, the history of the suburbs areas of the city of Naples.

The exhibition includes a small retrospective devoted to the Scampia Carnival Parade: one of the many initiatives, perhaps the most iconic, through which GRIDAS brought creativity to urban areas where that, simply, had not been foreseen. Initatives often impromptu and realized in a very short time, so as to deserve the title – given by Pignataro himself – of actions of “cultural first aid”.

In the Madre museum Pignataro's and GRIDAS' works dialogue with the artwork "Petrified Forest" by Jimmie Durham, finding between each other subtle analogies on the themes of work and of the dehumanizing drifts of capitalism and of the Western mechanisms of control and power, opposing them the forms of a liberating and re-aggregating creativity that starts from the individual and his desire of personal and collective redemption.