project by Giulio Baffi

Cantieri Viviani – Premio Viviani is a project of Fondazione Campania dei Festival that I designed and coordinated to contribute to the knowledge and dissemination of the work and personality of Raffaele Viviani by building opportunities for encounters between artists and young people who intend to reflect and work by comparing themselves with the great poetic territory proposed by this author.

The project has put in place a series of observatories / construction sites on the work and the human, poetic, cultural, theatrical, and musical territory of the great author born in Castellammare di Stabia on 10 January 1888 and died in Naples on 22 March 1950. I made use of the precious collaboration of prof. Antonia Lezza and prof. Pasquale Scialò and the involvement of numerous actors, musicians, artists, operators in the sector, scholars and experts on the work of the great author and actor from Stabia, as well as cultural institutions, university institutes, the B.B. A.A. of Naples, musical schools, specific university masters active in this sector, didactic and productive structures of the Regione Campania, in an exciting sum of knowledge, intuitions, elaborations, inventions that have led to very interesting and surprising artistic proposals and results.

The project was carried out in its first segment in the period between December 2016 and May 2017 in Castellammare di Stabia and Naples, paying particular attention to the creative processes and knowledge of young people, and will end in Castellammare di Stabia with the Festival Viviani - Viviani Prize, full of exhibitions, meetings, spectacular and cultural initiatives and with the delivery of the Raffaele Viviani Prize.

Theatrical, musical, graphic-design, video, photographic, reading, writing workshops, aimed at getting to know and deepening the figure and work of Raffaele Viviani, have allowed the development of original products involving an audience formed mainly by young people, blending tradition and transformation in an exemplary way, and mixing different genres and styles. With the collaboration of the School of Comix, graphic-design works inspired by comedies by the Stabiese author have been created, aimed at the creation and publication of comics intended in particular for the dissemination of Viviani's theater also among the students of the schools who have joined the initiative. The attentive and curious eye of young photographers of the photography chair of prof. Aniello Barone of the Academy of B.B. A.A. of Naples has read spaces and people of the City of Castellammare with original poetics, providing us with all the photographic equipment used in the work of promotion and printing.

The Festival Viviani, open to public and to the City of Castellammare di Stabia from 24 to 28 May 2017, is hosted in the magnificent setting of Antiche Terme Stabiane and provides an articulated program with spectacular moments of wide appeal as well as moments of comparison and information between the various participants in the construction sites.

The Cantieri sites set up in this first segment are: Cantiere di studio e approfondimento / Laboratorio didattico su Conoscenza and dissemination of the author in schools, Cantiere / Laboratorio Indagine of the fundamental role of the Vivianian theatrical language,  Cantiere della digitalizzazione del teatro di Viviani,  Cantiere della digitalizzazione Viviani project in the cradle, Cantiere Fonti Viviani, Cantiere Viviani Cosmopolita Napulitano, Cantiere Guaglione, Cantiere Devoti a Viviani, Cantiere di fotografia Oggi Viviani, Cantiere di graphic-design Viviani in comics, Cantiere for the staging of the show La Figliata.

To Fondazione Campania dei Festival that allowed me to work on it and to all those who participated in it, my thanks go and my wish that this extraordinary opportunity for meeting and discussion will leave a profound mark in the name of Raffele Viviani.