Fourth edition: Notes on taking care

The fourth edition of the ALA Art Prize is ready to start, with an open call dedicated to Italian and foreign artists and collectives of artists aged between 18 and 40 operating in Italy. The call is open until April 10, 2024 and it is possible to apply for free by filling out the online form on the website.

For the 2024 edition, the ALA Art Prize aims to reflect on the nuances of meaning in the concept of care by proposing “Notes on taking care” as the subject matter of the award.

What does taking care mean today? Of oneself, of the other from oneself, of things, of art? “To Care”, “To Cure”, listening to needs, allowing time. It is an emotional work, a re-generative action of physical and symbolic bodies.

The open call is intended as a moment of reflection to explore the phenomenology of care through visual languages. Without hesitating to investigate the risks related to excessive care. 

The 2024 edition invites us to imagine “taking care” as a social, cultural and political experience, stimulating reflection on power dynamics, on the  bonds of mutual dependency and on the creation of a community based on sharing and collective care: practices as narratives, in order to reconsider the boundaries between the public dimension and the private sphere, offering new perspectives on care as a form of investigation and documentation on human relationships, vulnerability and attention to other people’s lives.

And, thereby, annotations on things to do—or to remember—to take care as a medium for critical analysis, as a multidimensional move, a daily action capable of weaving together the plots of individual lives and the interconnected networks of global society.

Besides reflecting on this edition’s theme, artists will present a site-specific original project, purposely designed to be placed in one of the common spaces at ALA Headquarters, in the Mediterranean Theater of the Mostra d’Oltremare in Naples.

The winning project will be awarded a 10,000 EUR cash prize in order to cover the production costs of the work. Also in this edition, the artist will be granted 2,000 EUR fee. A publication with the winning work and the activities of ALA For Art during the year will complete and enrich the project.

Like previous editions, the jury will consist of international critics and curators such as Giovanni Carmine, Director of the Kunst Halle of San Gallo and curator of Art Basel Unlimited, Eugenio Viola, Chief Curator at MAMBO—Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá and Alessia Volpe, Exhibition Manager at the Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection in Paris.

The winning work will become part of the ALA Corporate Art Collection, joining the works of Bea Bonafini, Acque, Amare (2023), Alberto Tadiello, Luciferasi (2022), and Mariangela Levita, UP (2021), respectively awarded in the third, second and first edition of the ALA Art Prize, along with the works by Giulia Piscitelli, Andrea Bolognino, Antonio Della Guardia and Giorgia Garzilli—acquired thanks to the ALA For Art Acquisition Program in 2023 and 2022 with the purpose of enriching the ALA collection.

ALA Art Prize is a project by ALA For Art promoted by the ALA Group on initiative of entrepreneurs Fulvio Scannapieco and Vittorio Genna. “For the fourth year running,” states Genna, Vice President and co-founder of ALA “the synergy with contemporary art is for us at ALA a mission statement aimed at fostering an ecosystem in which the dialogue between creativity and business activates new prospects for growth which, starting from our offices, become catalysts for cultural vitality in the community.”