Toasts. Towards East: the traveling exhibition that recounts the journey to Asia of the artist Francesca Biondi

Toasts. Towards East: the traveling exhibition that recounts the journey to Asia of the artist Francesca Biondi.

The halls of Ducal Castle of Ceglie Messapica (Br) they open for Towards East, the traveling painting exhibition (sponsored by the Municipality of Ceglie Messapica) ofCegliese artist Francesca Biondi which tells the story of his trip to Asia achieved alone and without taking planes. The objective was not the destination but the direction, that is, the fascinating journey towards the East. The journey lasted about two years, from March 2018 to January 2020, and allowed her to visit 15 countries: Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Nepal, Pakistan.

“I decided to undertake the journey by land to better appreciate the cultural gaps and landscape peculiarities existing between my place of origin, southern Italy, and what lies to the east of it – explains the artist -. I was and am looking for places where the traditions of community life and the respectful relationship with nature are still existing, authentic and not artificial for commercial or tourist purposes. During my trip I had the opportunity to get closer to the local populations by seeking hospitality in their homes in order to become part of their daily lives, savoring their rhythms of life and relationships.

The coexistence lasted a few days but it was a very fertile territory for exchanging visions, emotions, knowledge, culinary recipes that enriched me like nothing else I could have wished for. A few months into the trip, I expanded this exchange by creating portraits of the people who offered me hospitality or who I was particularly impressed by.”

“Dedicating myself to studying the lines of their faces – continues Biondi – allowed me to get to know them much more in depth than I ever could with words. This tool was particularly useful for me in cases of language barriers, a difficulty often found in getting to know women who usually spoke less English than men. The gift of my portraits was one of the greatest reasons of joy and pride for the people who received them and all this motivated my desire to continue making them and donating them along my journey.

Thanks to the complete immersion in the daily life of life in the East, I bear witness to being a bridge between the two geographical-cultural hemispheres as well as between the two cerebral hemispheres: the East and the West meet, mix and complete each other within me through the harmonious dance between intuition and reason. The encounter with the other is a precious gift. It is a gift that has offered me the opportunity to expand my perspectives and learn to recognize and use with greater fluidity the expressive and adaptive capabilities of my body, my mind and my heart.”

In Towards East, Francesca Biondi decided to tell her story journey through painting because painting allowed her to process and communicate the conscious and unconscious content of her memories. Her aim is to offer a wide possibility of imagining the places encountered through the observation of the symbols and colors of the subjects she has portrayed. Her wish is that at the end of the visit one can have the feeling of having explored and known the places and people depicted and narrated in their daily lives. An exhibition entirely dedicated to Asia, to its extraordinary diversity and rich culture, to the infinite generosity and hospitality of its people which allowed her to feel at home even hundreds of kilometers from home.

Location: Ducal Castle
Address: via Chiesa, 11 – Ceglie Messapica (Br) – Puglia
When: from 10/06/2023 – to 09/07/2023
Vernissage: Saturday 10 June 2023 – 20pm – with the participation of Anna Rita Merico
Genres: contemporary art
Opening hours: every day from 9.30 to 12.30 and from 17.30 to 21.30 – free admission
Artist's talk: 17-24 June and 1-8 July at 19pm

Francesca Biondi was born in 1981 in Ceglie Messapica, a municipality not far from the city of Brindisi which has always offered her immediate and easy access to travel routes towards the East. She is a self-taught painter and has always favored drawing and painting as a means of exploration and expression of herself and what surrounds her. Environmental sustainability is of great importance to her and her life choices reflect its influence. Guided by her interest in ecology, at the age of 28 she left Italy and the security of a permanent job to start traveling in search of places where she could experiment with more sustainable lifestyles. Francesca now starts traveling again together with the paintings of her traveling exhibition to continue receiving gifts through those she meets and to cultivate the virtuous artistic process that was generated spontaneously during her trip to Asia through the interaction with the energies received .