A contemporary art experience in the heart of Engativá, open to everyone.
$5,000 COP
General admission
Carrera 74A # 82A-81
Engativá, Minuto de Dios · Bogotá
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No Repetition
Fellini 101
«Learn the rules like a pro,
so you can break them like an artist».
– Pablo Picasso
Art is an instrument through which human beings can reflect on or question themselves; it is the main tool for connecting with one's own creativity.
The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá MAC, the Centro de Cultura, Arte y Tradiciones UNIMINUTO, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, and Colectivo Errante invite artists from across the country to connect with the dreamlike world of the master Federico Fellini and, from there, to create any form of artistic expression during this time of social isolation — all of which are valid ways to take part in the open call.
From the 25th through October 31 materials will be received virtually at
The exhibition will remain on MAC's and the Istituto Italiano's website and social media until January 20, 2021, the day marking the 101st anniversary of the birth of the master, Federico Fellini.
Each artist who takes part in the event will receive a certificate of exhibition, and the winner of the open call will receive a one-semester scholarship at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Bogotá.
Requirements to participate
Works may be submitted in the following formats:
- Proposal submission form
- MP4 video (maximum 3 minutes)
- Photo of the works, for painting, sculpture, and photography, at 1080 resolution
- MP3 audio (maximum 3 minutes)
"A craftsman who has nothing to say, but knows how to say it"
With this phrase described the filmmaker Federico Fellini, born on January 20, 1920, in the city of Rome. An Italian director and screenwriter, he set a precedent in the film industry and left a cultural legacy in the seventh art. He spent his adolescence among books, friends, drawings, and dreams. At a young age, thanks to his indomitable talents, he worked for La Domenica del Corriere, the Florentine newspaper Il 420, Il Popol, and various media outlets, where he worked as an illustrator, proofreader, and writer. After several successes in his publications, he managed to move to Rome under the pretext of studying law, though his real intention was to become a journalist.
Fellini's artistic talent led him to draw comic portraits, political caricatures, and sequences for advertising campaigns, write series and magazine articles, and between scripts and drawings he reached the "Cente Italiano Audizioni Radiofoniche" and it was in that setting that he began to learn about the film format. In that bustling, burgeoning world of show business, he met Giulietta Masina, the Italian actress who would become the star of his films and his wife. By the 1940s, despite global conflicts and crumbling fascism, he met Tullio Pinelli, a playwright who invited him to form a professional partnership that launched Aldo Fabrizi to stardom; in 1944 he opened his portrait and caricature shop called The Funny Face Shop.
Fellini had a great interest in filmmaking and began writing scripts for various directors of the time, and by 1945 he met Roberto Rossellini, with whom he jointly developed one of the most outstanding films of the postwar period “Roma città aperta” his films stood out for their somber, dramatic, gloomy tone, nonsensical and detached from conventional cinema — so much so that one of his phrases, with no apparent meaning at all, came to identify him “Asa Nisi Masa”. After producing a hundred or so films, several of his movies traveled the world, and he was honored by academies such as the Oscars, with an honorary award for his professional career, and the Cannes Film Festival, among others; he passed away on October 31, 1993.
The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Bogotá, the Colectivo Errante, and the Centro de Cultura, Arte y Tradiciones invite the community to take part in the contest "The Dream Universe of Filmmaker Federico Fellini" to celebrate the centennial of his birth.
For more information, you can click the following link about the Fellini Call for Entries and register on the following form.
Enjoy the following short film made by Enrico Mandirola, Diego Santamaria, and Colectivo Errante: Asa Nisi Masa
The Italian filmmaker surrounded himself with artists, critics, intellectuals, writers, cartoonists, filmmakers, and a whole world of people who guided him in his process as a director. His films were full of drama, action, mysterious silences, and extravagant, grotesque situations; his particular talent led him to create works that did not meet the standards of cinema at the time. His grandeur made him one of Italy's great stars and a unique figure in the film industry; his unconventional films offered the world alternative narratives, with neurotic, strange characters — something irreverent for the era. These are some of the filmmaker's works that traveled around the world.
In one of his films released in 1954, Fellini established himself as one of the most prestigious directors in the world, contributing to the seventh art with the singular "La Strada", a work steeped in Italian neorealism, starring his wife, actress Giulietta Masina, whose character is a young woman sold to a performer in southern Italy, with whom she travels the country; the relationship between hatred and love, violence, the repression of women, machismo, among other factors that Fellini possibly portrayed to show how our attitudes can drive away those we love most. This film included an unforgettable and magnificent soundtrack that immortalized it as one of the best soundtracks in the history of cinema. The “Nina Rota”.
Academy Award Winners
Other Films
Pier Paolo Pasolini on Federico Fellini (1957)
I will always remember the morning I met Fellini: a "fabulous" morning, to use his favorite expression. We set off in his car, massive and soft, drunk and precise (like him), from Piazza del Popolo, and street after street we made our way out into the countryside: was it the Flaminia? Or the Aurelia? Or perhaps the Cassia? The only thing certain, in a physical sense, was that it was the countryside, with paved roads, gas stations, a few hamlets, some rather wild kids on bicycles, and all of it wrapped in an immense green husk, steeped in sun still cold, enveloping everything. Fellini drove with one hand and pointed here and there at the landscape, with the constant risk of running over the wild kids and ending up in a ditch, yet also giving the impression that this, in reality, was impossible: he drove the car magically, almost tugging and catching it, as if it hung from a thread.
One hand, then, on the wheel, maternal like an older woman wanting to look attractive, concentrated like an alchemist; with the other, Fellini twirled his hair, using a single index finger as if it were a lathe or a spindle. As he dragged me through that countryside lost in a honey of extreme sweetness, he told me the plot of Le notti di Cabiria.I, a little Peruvian cat beside a great Siamese cat, listened to him, while keeping a book by Auerbach in my pocket.
Still did not understand Fellini: what I believed I detected as a limitation would, in time, reveal itself to be his enormous and total virtue. Try to imagine a slug as big as a city — Knossos or Palmyra — into whose interior you enter like heroes out of Rabelais: and there inside you will find things that are at first disappointing, like a gas station attendant or a prostitute offering herself in a cartoonish dress: you sense a disproportion between the enormity of the setting and the pettiness of the concrete, sensible things transplanted there: but then, little by little, you realize that the slug-labyrinth digests and assimilates everything within its horrible and radiant innards: and it ends up digesting you too, if you're not careful.
The human form proper to Fellini is constantly at risk: it tends to rearrange and recompose itself according to the earlier shape that suggests it. An enormous blot, which depending on one's fancy might resemble an octopus, an amoeba enlarged under a microscope, an Aztec ruin, a drowned cat. But a west wind, a skid of the car, is enough for everything to blend together again and transform the whole into a man: an extremely tender, intelligent, shrewd, and frightened man, with two ears crafted in the most perfect laboratory of acoustic instruments, and a mouth that scatters around him the most curious phonemes that the crossing of the Romagnol and Roman dialects has ever produced: shouts, exclamations, interjections, diminutives, the whole apparatus of Giovanni Pascoli's pre-grammar.
In his account of Le Notti, I fearfully awaited a disproportion between the concrete, sensible tone, the context and the realistic taste, and the almost surreal imaginary, even if tempered by humor. And this is what I noted down and told him the following night: once again inside the belly of his car, parked and lit on some vast, senseless avenue, wherever the enormous prostitute we were searching for, la Bomba, might turn up. He listened to me huddled in the red seat, like a mother hen, like a Madonna del Manto, with his broad cheek, with his bruised eye, in which a flash of attention or anxiety was imprinted, like a duller tint that sometimes made him seem more human, with his retina, his hazel-colored pupil, which made him seem almost funny and immensely affectionate, as if by chance he had been a little frightened because of my Auerbach.
We never found la Bomba, despite driving down all those avenues that circled again and again around the Passeggiata Archeologica, with the groups of prostitutes reddened by the brush of the lights, and the rascals in little groups or alone, sitting astride the walls, their little backsides up, and jacket collars raised gracefully around carefully styled heads, as if they were wedding cakes, the part straight and white, the curls, and full sail ahead.
Translation: Alessandra Merlo
A literary and film theorist, professor in the Department of Languages and Culture. She works on still imagery (photography), film, media, and representation. Her books include: Mirar una película [Watching a Film], Cuatro ensayos sobre el cine italiano [Four Essays on Italian Cinema], and Los útiles y los inútiles [The Useful and the Useless].
Here you can download and enjoy the full text. Pier Paolo Pasolini on Federico Fellini
La dolce vita in view of possible digressions
Spectral memory, cinema is a magnificent mourning, a work of magnified mourning.
Jacques Derrida, Cinema and Its Ghosts
"It seems to me that I am nowhere. If death is like this, it isn't a nice job."
Federico Fellini, The Journey of G. Mastorna
If whoever remains in the place normally assigned to the audience, for one reason or another, had to recognize themselves as hanging on the famous film, identifying up to a certain critical point with the one who welcomes the big star arriving from the United States who, upon crossing the threshold of the plane, opens her arms like the benevolent statue of Christ hanging from the helicopter in the opening sequence on its way to the Vatican — that statue whose swinging shadow caresses millennial ruins, squalid tenements of housing projects under construction, sweating laborers, and rowdy Pasolinian street kids, a monument pursued by a second, swirling vehicle with an attached photo-reporter, the archetypal Paparazzo, in the company of the character who is, at first and last glance, the protagonist, provided that the notions of beginning and personified unity are no longer at stake: Marcello Rubini, a budding writer resigned to the role of cynical jewel of the sweetest gossip and crime tabloids, a questionable protagonist, so that the italics might ease the naive paradox.
Finally self-antagonist perhaps not as tortuous as his filicidal and suicidal mentor, Steiner, a distinguished poet attentive to Sanskrit literature (as would be confirmed by his compassionate ideals of total renunciation, "beyond passions, detached", in the branching wake of the Eastern practice of detachment, vairâgya according to Patanjali's ancient teachings), a devotee of naturalness and of a threatening, abyssal supernature promised no less by the crash of thunder or the song of little birds than by the shiver of Bach behind the organ of the Basilica of San Giovanni Bosco, or by the syllabic babbling of his little children — an evidently irreproachable spouse, a most tender family father, and at the same time a shadowy architect whom Marcello, stupefied, before the police commissioner, will end up defining as someone who "perhaps was afraid of himself"... if whoever then approaches Fellini's work were to identify, straight off, with the gaze of any one among the pack of professional admirers gathered at the foot of the Alitalia steps trodden by the great star, one might be led to believe that, applauding live and direct the initiative of the film producer responsible for so grand a welcome, a sharp little mustached dandy determined to have the newly landed star reflected in the mirror of a visceral national emblem, the rhetorical formulas of the RAI (Radio y Televisión Italiana) announcer, delighted with the colors of the pizza that "seem to sum up our country's joy of living".
These words could be turned around, upending the value of the polychrome offering, so that tomato and mozzarella, blood and milk stirred together, embody not merely the vital sweetness of one nation among others, but above all the mournful bitterness of a planetary backwater given over to the spectacular disguise of bloody sacrifices that are all too common and utterly ordinary — in two words, consumable products, adorable and chewable at the Hollywood level of the bisteccona, microphone aside, a compliment of cannibalistic temperament wielded by the RAI professional in honor of the torrid maternal abundance of a buxom woman, a none-too-distant relative of the shopkeeper from Amarcord and the Saracen woman from 8 1/2.
Luxuriously expansive, rather, and fashionable, without setting aside bestialitypertinent, that is to say, freeing from anthropocentric baggage not only the materialist excess of the Spirit of spirits, inseparable from the timeless messianic rupture brought up by the anonymous old woman (a retired, anti-missionary ethnologist, perhaps?) with whom Marcello's girlfriend entertains herself on the pasture of the wretched miracle, at the foot of the technical rig of the butcher from the RAI: - "What do you mean it doesn't matter whether it's the Blessed Virgin or not?" is Emma's question on the outskirts of the eternal city, kilometer 47, during the filming of another movie within the movie, neither too far nor too near the pair of ill-trained, mischievous street kids who drag from here to there, da capo, the crowd of worshippers in the service of the media set design, mobs of paparazzi.
Bruno Mazzoldi
Born in Milan in 1942, Bruno Mazzoldi has lived in Colombia since 1961. He has taught at the Escuela Normal para Varones in Fonseca, Baja Guajira, at the Colegio Junín on Providencia Island, and at the Universidad del Cauca and the Universidad de Nariño. A former vocalist with Pegi Dromgold's jazz group, he is a member of the Cátedra Juan Marinello at the Universidad Central de Las Villas in Cuba. His publications include: Proyecto “Tableaux Mourants” (with José A. Restrepo), U. Nacional, Bogotá, 2004; La entrevista de bolsillo [The Pocket Interview] – Jacques Derrida Responds to Freddy Téllez and B. M., Siglo del Hombre / Inst. Pensar, Bogotá, 2005; A veces Derrida [Derrida, Sometimes] (Derrida desde las Indias [Derrida from the Indies]; Bordes de la plegaria [Edges of Prayer]; Golosa [Gluttonous]), Universidad Externado, Bogotá, 2013. Forthcoming: Avenida Séptima Blues and Perreo respetuoso [Respectful Perreo]. He lives in Bogotá.
Here you can download and enjoy the full text. La Dolce Vita Bruno Mazzoldi
There are many ways to capture ideas, to shape our dreams and bring them into being; Fellini had a particular method for projecting and imagining what would become his great films. Paper and pencil, even before words, were his first draft. Through his caricatures he brought to life thousands of characters, settings, and ideas that he sought for his works; those "scribbles" as he used to call them, became a way of voicing opinions and leveling criticism at postwar society. His lines fired off any manner of nonsense, flashes of inspiration, and magical unreality; those mocking, hyper-exaggerated faces crossed borders and remained in the midst of a constant flight from reality. And although to him they were simple drawings, they have been exhibited in museums such as the Guggenheim.
"Why do I draw the characters in my films? Why do I sketch their faces, their noses, their mustaches, their ties, their bags, the way they cross their legs, and sketch the people who come to see me at the office? Maybe I've already said this; it is a way of beginning to look the film in the face, to see what kind it is, the attempt to fix my attention on something, however tiny, even insignificant, but which seems to me to have something to do with the film and, in some veiled way, speaks to me of it".
Federico Fellini.
A Social Communicator graduate of Universidad Javeriana, with extensive experience in the cultural sector and in corporate communication strategy. She was founding director of ARTBO, the Bogotá Art Fair, between 2004 and 2011, and later ran the Aurora art and design gallery in Bogotá.
A Social Communicator with a Master's degree in Communication, Development and Social Change from UNIMINUTO. Since 2019 she has led the Institution's national Communications production: internal communications, community management and content creation, coordination of social media and digital platforms, and general radio and television production for the Cultural Magazine of UNIMINUTO's Center for Culture, Art and Traditions.