PRÉSENCES RÉELLES: THEATER AT THE ROOTS OF ARTE POVERA A conversation with Didier Semin
Pier Paolo Calzolari
Performance Appunti Appunto,
Galleria Salvatore Ala, Milan, 1978
Crédit photo : Paolo Mussat Sartor
© Pier Paolo Calzolari / Adagp, Paris
A conversation with Didier Semin
Germano Celant, who popularized the term Arte povera [Poor Art], was inspired by director Jerzy Grotowski’s manifesto “Towards a Poor Theatre”. Theater is thus, in itself, present at the bedside of poor art – and Pier Paolo Calzolari’s ephemeral, evolving installations are exemplary testimony to this. We’ll be looking to see how this movement has, in a general way, re-enacted in the contemporary age the age-old complicity between the “art of time” that is theater and the “arts of space” that are the visual arts.
Born in 1954, Didier Semin was successively curator at the Musée des Sables-d’Olonne, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Mnam/Centre Pompidou, until 1998. He then taught art history at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, from 1998 to 2020. He is the author of numerous articles on contemporary Italian artists, and in 1992 published a comprehensive work entitled L’Arte Povera (Éditions du Centre Pompidou), reissued in 2016. He is also author of the catalog for the exhibition “Pier Paolo Calzolari – Casa Ideale”, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco – Villa Paloma.
