This talk forms part of nctm e l’arte’s cycle of talks dedicated to the topic of healthcare and the right to well-being

It will be focused on the artistic practice of Francesco Bertocco and Rachele Maistrello.

With the project Historia, which is currently nearing completion, Bertocco explores the topic of care as a factor of identity affirmation.

His focus goes to the contrast between official Western-style medicine and system medicine in a country – Chile – where the ethnic tension between the majority population and the original ethnic groups is still unresolved. Here, the theme played a central role in the protests unleashed in autumn 2018 by the Mapuche and Aymara populations, which focused, inter alia, on the political claim to the right to traditional treatment practices. The artist thus addresses the issue of political, ideological and social-and-cultural choices, combining the issue of care with the colonial and post-colonial dynamics that shape today’s world in all its aspects.

Francesco Bertocco, with his project Historia curated by Viafarini with Mariagrazia Muscatello, won the seventh edition of the Italian Council competition (2019), a competition devised by the Direzione Generale Arte e Architettura contemporanee e Periferie urbane (DGAAP) of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.

Rachele Maistrello’s Stella Maris project, on the other hand, stems from sympathetic contact with the guests of a nursing home in the Venetian lagoon. The place is surrounded by the sea and nature.

Through a succession of conversations and the creation of drawings, the artist evokes traces of personal stories and, at the same time, gives life to new imaginative forms linked to water, the context and personal iconographies. The sense of time and sedimentation underlies the work, which suggests a reflection on life, death and memory.

The work is exemplary of Maistrello’s methods, which, starting from an attitude of thoughtfulness, tends to make her works emerge from long participatory paths of daily immersion in specific and minor social realities.

Both artists were awarded scholarships by nctm e l’arte: Artists-in-Residence.