Artist Gio Montez receives the Premio Creature 2018 for his pioneering role in urban cultural regeneration through Atelier Montez. Honored by Open House Rome at the Goethe-Institut, Montez was celebrated for leading one of the city’s most innovative participatory art laboratories, transforming industrial space into a living hub for community-driven creativity.
Evacuazione emerges from an urban emergency, transforming accumulation, neglect, and abandonment into an act of removal and regeneration. The action displaces waste from the streets into the symbolic economy of art, where discarded materials are reconfigured as provisional objects rather than definitive works. Value is shifted away from the artifact toward the gesture itself: the physical act of clearing space, restoring attention, and reactivating collective responsibility. In Evacuazione, art functions as a temporary tool, an operative process that privileges care over possession and demonstrates how minimal, shared actions can recalibrate the relationship between bodies, materials, and public space.
Gio Montez sculpted a monumental candle from 60 kilograms of beeswax for the biennial of light culture, allowing fire and hand to shape it together. The work emphasized process over product: visitors witnessed the candle’s gradual transformation while the artist remained on site, carving as it slowly burned.
Revisited in later editions of the biennial, the piece remains unfinished, a meditation on time, materiality, and the interplay between human action and elemental forces, highlighting Montez’s focus on art as an evolving, lived experience.