THE NORTHERN DIMENSION OF INI


Ten years ago, during the world wide artists' chain letter happening Angelo Merante wrote to me. He was interested in what was happening in Northern European town of Kemi. We started to correspond giving a birth to an idea of having an INI art exhibition at the Kemi Art Museum. The museum has been founded in 1947, but at the same time when we wrote our first letters the new art museum has been completed as a part of the Kemi cultural centre. The exhibition hall of the museum is especially suitable for the modern art.
In 1994 Kemi Art Museum was proud to present INI for the first time in Finland as such a large exhibition which was noted nation wide. The exhibition was held from the 1st of July to the 28th of August in 1994. It was realized by CUSMARC (Pescara) and Angelus Novus (L'Aquila). The responsible inists who especially planned everything and who also were present in Kemi as exhibition architects and introducers of the INI were Antonio Gasbarrini, Angelo Merante and François Proia. There were 24 participating artists: from Italy Laura Aga-Rossi, Giovanni Agresti, Gabriele-Aldo Bertozzi, Furio De Mattia, Pietro Ferrua, Eugenio Giannì, Lisiak-Land Díaz, Moreno Marchi, Giorgio Mattioli, Angelo Merante, Antonino Russo and Argentina Capriotti; from France (partly from Italy) François Proïa; from Spain Maria Luz Bermejo Baquero, Manuel Bermudez, José-Luis Campal, Jabier Herrero, Ibirico, Juan Orozco Ocaña and Francisco-Juan Molero Prior; from Cuba Pedro Juan Gutierrez; from United States Paul Lambert and Lex Loeb and from Argentina Julio Carreras.
Antonio Gasbarrini wrote in the catalogue that the exhibition at the Kemi Art Museum was again a proof that inism was spreading to every part of the world.
One of the inists, Lex Loeb, sent later his works of art to the Humbug Summer exhibition at the Kemi Art Museum in 1996, when I tried to explore the strange and controversial phenomena of UFO's, Bigfoot and Elvis. However, it took four years after our first INI exhibition when I wrote again to Angelo Merante. I had an idea to have a new exhibition. This time I traveled to Rome, in May 1999, to meet Merante and Gabriele-Aldo Bertozzi. At Bertozzi's home I could see the whole history of INI carefully documented by him and Laura Aga-Rossi whom I also met, like the old acquaintances Gasbarrini and Proïa. At the place there were also Merante, Maura Picchioni and Giorgio Mattioli. I presented shortly my idea of the exhibition and later the INI council decided about the details. In Rome it was also very stimulating to see Bertozzi, the founder of INI, in action, when he had a lecture in Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" about translating avant-garde.
The intention is that after the second exhibition in 2000 there is going to be also another, the third, meeting of inists in Kemi. My plans are that it will happen after two or three years, and in cold and snowy winter - a new challenge for the INI. This idea is based on the words of Laura Aga-Rossi when she asked me in Rome about the colours of winter.


Kemi, 2nd of August 2000
Pekka Rönkkö
Kemin taidemuseo (Kemi Art Museum)
FINLAND

LA DIMENSIONE NORDICA DELL'INI