Rooftop, Cineteatro Ariston (Trapani) – On 16 August 2022, during the second event of the series “Salotti Trapanesi”, held on the rooftop of the Cineteatro Ariston in Trapani, Manifest Action No. 20 – “VENERATION” by Gio Montez, in collaboration with performer Violet’Or, took place. The action was introduced to participants by curator Andrea Salvaggio as a form of “action theatre”, in continuity with the artist’s ongoing performative research.
The event unfolded in parallel with the traditional and widely felt popular celebration dedicated to the Madonna of the Fishermen of Trapani, a central moment in the city’s devotional calendar. In this context, the action coincided with a particularly critical institutional phase for the “La Salerniana” Collection: the then artistic director Michela Cossyro communicated the revocation of the Palazzo Vicario’s assignment as a permanent museum site, making it necessary to immediately vacate the premises and urgently identify a new location for the contemporary art collection.
This crisis initiated a prolonged period of institutional and material displacement for La Salerniana, including the work NONèTERNIT, recently acquired with funding from the Italian Ministry of Culture (MiC) and SIAE. After months of uncertainty, the collection was ultimately granted asylum at the University of Catania, under the decision of its president Marco Nicodemo.
In the meantime, Gio Montez issued a public appeal to the city of Trapani and its artistic community, requesting temporary asylum for the artworks in transit, now deprived of a stable institutional home. Within this condition of forced mobility, NONèTERNIT and the Montez project moved through a series of provisional hosting spaces, including Il Baglio Liberameliberatutti by Nicola Candela in Fontana Salsa, where the installation was temporarily transformed into a “lay chapel” intended as a place of prayer for travelling artists.
It is within this framework that Manifest Action No. 20 – “VENERATION” takes place, conceived as a performative and propitiatory rite addressed to the Madonna of the Fishermen of Trapani, a deeply rooted figure in local devotional culture. The action functions as a collective act of intercession, articulating the invocation: “WHEREVER YOU ARE, PROTECT THE ARTISTS”, symbolically extended to the safeguarding of the collection, the artworks, and the artistic community as a whole.
Deprived of a “Madonna of Artists”, the practice therefore turns to the Marian figure already embedded in the city’s ritual fabric, reinterpreting her as a universal figure of protection extended to contemporary artistic practice.
The performance involved artists and young participants from the Salotti Trapanesi, gathered in a space of discussion and exchange on art, culture, and current affairs. Monsignor Liborio Palmeri was also fascinated and intrigued by the lay prayer and non-canonical artistic practice of Gio Montez which brought together so many cultural stakeholders in such a short time, later inviting him to find refuge at the San Rocco Museum. The action documented by Tomasz Waraksa, contributing to the construction of a visual archive of this transitional phase of the project, later also became content for a further photographic exhibition “Senza Nome” at the San Rocco Museum.
With “VENERATION”, Gio Montez reaffirms the relational and social nature of his arte d’azione, in which performative gesture intersects with the institutional fragilities of the contemporary world, transforming crisis into ritual device and prayer into a public form of cultural resistance.