In Sesto Prize

For the twelfth edition of the In Sesto Prize, the competitors are two Italian artists—Matteo Nasini (Rome, 1976) and Maria Walcher (Brixen, 1984)—and the German duo of Sinta Werner and Markus Wüste (Hattingen, 1977 and Kötzting, 1970). As usual, they were asked to design a public art work for a specific place in the town: the green area near the Elio Susanna parking lot. Works representative of each artists’ research are exhibited on the first floor of the old prison of the town (Antiche Carceri), while on the ground floor, the three project proposals are put on display to be voted on by the visitors. In Meriggio assorto (a title that in Italian suggests, with a poetic register, the idea of an ‘absorbed afternoon’) , Nasini evokes the mythological figure of the mermaid and proposes a life-size glazed ceramic sculpture. The mermaid has lost her voice, and she is lying on the grass immersed in reading a book. Welcher’s Tocca a te (meaning, in Italian, ‘It’s your turn’) originates from two typical elements of San Vito: the exposed bricks and the red and white streaks on the building walls. The artist presents a work that consists of an unstable brick tower and an intervention on the trees. In Noise Reduction, Werner and Wüste analyse the relationship between the analog and the digital world by proposing the sculpture of a "pixelated dog". From a distance the dog may seem real, but it is only by approaching that we can identify a sculpture made of layers of overlapping cubes, a two-dimensional image that seems to be not completely "loaded" or that has been intentionally rendered anonymous.