On Friday, September 06, 2024 at 6:30 p.m., the exhibition: “Energy Reveals Post-Anthropocene Bionic Art” by Filippo Panseca will be inaugurated at Galletti Inguaggiato Palace. The opening of the exhibition curated by Ezio Pagano, will be preceded by a conversation between professor Franco Lo Piparo and the artist. The exhibition will be open until Sept. 28, 2024, Tuesday through Saturday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.

From the Web.
Everyone remembers him for the symbol of the Carnation, for the phantasmagoric displays of the PSI congresses, for the eight-metre LED pyramid which from the Ansaldo workshops multiplied the image of the socialist leader enormously. But Filippo Panseca, “Craxi’s architect”, who is not an architect (as he himself likes to clarify), is instead an all-round artist, with a vision, his own human and social mission and an ancient passion for innovation which led him to combine creativity and love for the environment. For example, twenty years ago he designed the prototype of a solar machine, he was among the first to use the PC to produce and multiply art, conceptually anticipating, even with his pictorial ATMs, the idea of ​​digital art and therefore, ideally, the subsequent diffusion of the circulation of works in Nft. And again, he creates works using luminescent phosphor paint to captivate his viewers. The latest frontier is the production of paintings and installations covered with a patina that exploits the photocatalytic properties of titanium dioxide. In practice, a material that depollutes the environment around it (“I’m not saying that, but the Istituto Superiore di Sanità”). And therefore able to purify the surrounding environment, obtaining the same effect that planting trees would have even where this is not possible, even when there is no longer time to wait for the beneficial effects of nature. Now, to promote the spread of this virtuous practice and support the spread of art at the same time, Panseca has taken pen and paper and written a bill. Or better. He took the PC and got help from Artificial Intelligence to develop the legislative measure. Born in 1940, and founder in Italy, way back in 1991, of the first chair of Computer Art at the Brera Academy, for years he has been convinced to get help from AI to propose regulations: such as the one designed to stop the progressive depopulation of the population of Pantelleria, the island where for years, as a Palermo native, he has put down roots. You are an artist and inventor, you have always dealt with environmental issues and technological innovation “I define myself as a researcher: art is in everything, any work if done with passion is art. But there is an epigraph at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo that says: “Art renews peoples and reveals their life. Delight is useless in scenes where it does not aim to prepare the future.” What can an artist do to help build the future? “Once upon a time, see the Renaissance, it was the art that defined the character of its time, of its century. Now the world is changing and we are in the midst of an epochal change. The climate, the melting of glaciers, wars, technology accelerate change and tell us that we are entering a new geological era, we are in the post-Anthropocene. And so I ask myself: what is the function of an artist in this new era? What do we do in this crucial moment for humanity? Do we continue to expose banana peels?” And what can the artist of the new era do? “Man has always had an interest in the life he lives, ever since he lived in caves and painted himself and the nature that surrounded him on the walls of those caves. Today man has become bionic and survives also thanks to the help of technologies that have partly replaced many of the normally biological functions. Why not do it to help nature too? Why not work towards a ‘bionic nature’?” Does your bill aim to do this? “Art, like everything that man produces, can be negative or positive, even towards the environment. When I saw that the State was helping citizens to change their boilers so as not to pollute, it occurred to me that very little would be enough to clean up the air in all homes. If we calculate that in Italy there are approximately 35 million lighting contracts for homes, offices, warehouses, we can deduce that if in each of these rooms we introduce an average of one square meter of photocatalytic canvases, i.e. treated with a transparent paint made of nanoparticles of titanium, we could purify the entire space. Even if only 20% of the contract holders signed up, we could have 7 million purifying works, on average one square meter each. And one square meter of photocatalyst-treated canvas purifies the air as much as a tall tree. In short, with little effort we could have the same result that planting 7 million large trees would provide.”
Putting it that way, it seems like a very simple operation to carry out. It brings to mind Boeri’s Vertical Forest “It would be a useful solution for the community and which would allow the State to finance art by encouraging artists to do new and different things. Municipalities could also purchase photocatalytic works to clean up cities in a short time, beautifying them. As for the vertical forest… it is a trend, a mockery, a prison for those who live there. Better a ‘bionic’ tree. I designed one 20 meters high to be installed in the garden that hosts the Vertical Forest: it would immediately reclaim the environment like 350 tall trees, passively throughout the year and without further maintenance. It wasn’t possible for me to make it happen and so here I am, in Pantelleria, cultivating my vegetable garden, without regrets.”