Birth of Finestreria

Open Call 2020 | OPEN CALL FOR ARTISTS
The call remains open until the end of the quarantine.

It all started with the implementation of a call for artists in collaboration with Adriana Amoruso. The call for entries was liked by many artists receiving many signups among which in the Instagram profile can be seen the exhibition of: Patrizia Giambi, Alvise Bittente, Daniela Manzolli, Franco Spina, Anna Bochkova, Li Hui, Lorenzo Morri, Alessandro Matera. Collaborating with so many artists has been an exciting journey, on the one hand totally submerging the quarantine days, and on the other enriching the time with magical cooperations. This sedentary journey that has gone from Milan to Florence, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Munich, Bologna, New Mexico, and Russia has found in 2022 a way to try to make tangible the work that in the past has had an exclusively digital realization.
This page will tell the story of 2020 Finestreria and the early collaborations that occurred at a distance, detailed on Art Studio Finestreria‘s Instagram page.

Application form from March 2020
One artist per week.

HOW ARE YOU?
This question has never been as profound as it is today.
How are you spending your time during this historic quarantine?
How are your loved ones doing? What is happening in your country?
What do you see from your window?
Tell us about it.

FINESTRERIA
Finestreria aims to be a call for emerging artists.
The competition is supported by the non-profit cultural association Overground, founded in 2014, with the specific goal of creating local collaborations that foster social cohesion. FINESTRERIA also collaborates with Studio Ipogeo, established in 2017 in Milan as an artist studio and exhibition space.
From our window, the gaze is directed toward contemporary art in all its forms: flash mobs, painting, poetry, video art, installations, performances, happenings, audio, digital art, and more. We are fascinated by imperceptible, relational, utopian, and urban art—art without expressive limits in the personal explorations of each artist.
The year 2020 seems to be a poetic succession of Plan Bs and improvised ideas due to the coronavirus.

he FINESTRERIA project was born from the idea of creating, through the only place that today allows us to freely come into contact with the outside world, the window precisely, an online gallery: a Finestreria.

In order to leave the house, we must have a self-certification justifying our travels but only if strictly necessary: going to work, exercising or taking a walk with our dog. We don’t need any self-certification to look at the sun from our balcony, to look out onto the street and expose our most deeply creative reality to the world. As the Italian artist Alberto Garutti said at one of his lectures, “we can look at what a bee is doing and wonder what it must be thinking,” but only if this freedom does not exceed the rectangular boundaries of the window that allows us to observe the outside world. The window in 2020 is the most open place we know and with which we cannot avoid relating to others and ourselves.

How did the project of Art Studio Finestreria come about?
The original idea started online in 2020 in collaboration with an artist friend of mine, Adriana Amoruso. We were all locked in the house during the pandemic, and the window seemed to be the only place of freedom and boundary. On that theme, we organized a call to collect the works of emerging and more established artists in an online gallery.

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN ITALY?
Decree-Law February 23, 2020 no. 6 Urgent measures on containment and management of epidemiological emergency from COVID-19. A few days later, March 01, 2020, Prime Minister’s Decree and again Decree-Law March 02, 2020 no. 9, the Prime Minister’s Decree of March 8, 2020, the Prime Minister’s Decree of March 9, 2020.
Up to the Decree-Law of March 17, 2020, no. 8 with measures to strengthen the National Health Service and provide economic support for families, workers and businesses related to the epidemiological emergency from COVID-19. These dates represent and mark the history of Italian life as they have not for at least 75 years. We are involuntary witnesses to history.

Italy is officially “red zone” until April 03, 2020, although we all understood that this quarantine could last much longer. Italians are in quarantine, and soon the whole world might be too.
Closed inside our homes, we pace around our rooms to protect ourselves and those around us.