‘Delle città come dei sogni’ (Of cities like dreams ) is an interdisciplinary project which, through a hybrid path between drawing and installation, intends to reinterpret in a contemporary key one of the key themes of Italo Calvino's production on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the great Italian writer.
Cities are a set of many things, writes Calvino: of memory, of desires, of signs of a language, words, memories. Fascinated and full of curiosity, Catalli follows these suggestions by creating a dreamlike exhibition itinerary, nevertheless capable of deeply investigating our time and its weaknesses. Between the infinitely small and the immensely large, interiors and exteriors, magical intuitions, the artist moves and re-imagines situations, scenarios and adventures, not without bringing into play punctual reflections on our contemporaneity, in which the very concept of city is put to the test by a succession of calamities and states of emergency. Among the works on display, "The clouds - the sky above the city" and "Diary - the silence", declinations of invisible cities: a collection of images created by hand and then printed on postcards that the public can dedicate and then send. A journey that will be mapped making Calderara di Reno the center of a newborn global city.

Curated by Adiacenze, in collaboration with Casa della Cultura Italo Calvino - Calderara

Dream Circus Project is an itinerant relational art project born in 2011 which aims to investigate the visual imagery of night dreams, creating dialogue, meeting and contact between its visitors.

The project aims to translate the dream world into a graphic sign, to make it a traveling circus of dreams based on meeting and exchange, from city to city and acting as a real relational device.

Dream Circus looks like an installation made up of dozens of small drawings on paper. The public is invited to tell in writing a dream or a nightmare that has particularly affected them.

For each dream collected, Daniele creates one or more drawings. In exchange for their dream, people receive the drawing generated by another person's dream, chosen from those available on display, with the sole criterion of following instinct and suggestion in choosing the image. As dreams are chosen, the installation changes, giving way to new images.


Read more and partecipate @ Museo del Sogno ︎︎︎

Senza Testa. Breve storia della decapitazione in rime e disegni (Headless. A brief history of beheading in rhymes and drawings) deals with the death penalty by beheading, one of the most symbolic of capital punishments, through the stories of 25 historical executed. Each of these characters is portrayed from the rhymes of Lucio Villani and the duotone drawings by Daniele Catalli. By superimposing the red filter attached to the book, with a very quick gesture the head disappears and the protagonist is beheaded, as quickly as at the time the sentence was carried out.

Red Star Press, Roma 2022
Text: Lucio Villani

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