Stefano Romano (Naples, 1975). Artist, curator, and researcher.
His research moves along the uncertain boundaries between personal experience and the collective dimension, between political action and intimate reflection, between word, image, and gesture.
His approach is based on the idea of the artwork as an “event”: a spatio-temporal process that often requires the active participation of the viewer in order to be completed. In this way, his projects become a radical investigation into the instability of the present, the precariousness of identity, and time as a critical territory to be traversed.
In an era that demands results, clarity, and completion, Romano claims the right to incompleteness, transformation, and interruption as possible forms of existence and resistance. In his poetics, failure becomes a critical field to inhabit, a tool for questioning identity, the flow of time, the fragility of social structures, and the incompleteness of processes.
His research is translated into temporary actions, performances, installations, video works, photography, and drawings.
After graduating from the “G. Carrara” Academy of Fine Arts in Bergamo, he earned a Ph.D. in architecture and urban planning through a joint program at the University of Ferrara (Italy) and Polis University in Tirana (Albania). He currently works as a researcher at the Albanian Academy of Sciences, in the Center for Art Studies, where he also serves as the scientific coordinator of the journal Art Studies.
He has been working for more than twenty years in Albania, where he conceived several projects as an artist and curator, among which we can mention: 1.60insurgent space project, whose focus was on public space; he was also co-founder of the T.I.C.A. (Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art). In 2012, he was co-founder of the DZT collective (DyZeroTre) and of the MAPS – Mobile Archive on Public Space platform. His latest project is The Mobile School of Visual Arts, a pedagogical project based on the idea of art as the production of knowledge and active participation.