The Women's Fiction Festival and the Musma Museum of Modern Sculpture of Matera, Italy, will be organizing an exciting and unusual event for the inauguration of the international literary festival, 'Touching Sculptures, Writing Emotions', to be held on the 24th of September, at 5 pm.
The writers attending the international writers' conference are invited to experience works of art in a completely new way: blindfolded. The writers will be 'seeing' selected sculptures of the Musma collection through touch.
After a brief tour of the Museum, the participants will be blindfolded and will then explore a number of works of art through their fingertips. Among the works of art involved will be: Persephone Nova by Ibram Lassaw, la Pietà by Leoncillo, the Sybill by Pericle Fazzini, the Great Crouching Figure by Emilio Greco and the Bust of Simona by Antonietta Raphael.

Participants will then be encouraged to share their experiences in a purely tactile exploration of the works of art and their experiences will be recorded in Musma's Book of Memories.

The aim of the event is to foster a greater awareness of art in generatl and of writing in particular, as one single, fruitful process of artistic creation. 

MUSMA - Palazzo Pomarici
Via San Giacomo – Sasso Caveoso Fondazione Zétema tel. 0835/330582  -
Coop. Artezeta 320-5350910 - www.musma.it

MYTHOLOGIES 2009 – REA ZOE STAVROPOULOS
Happy hour for WFF participants: Friday, 25th September, 5:00 pm
Studio d’Arte “Il Comignolo”, Via  del Casale 55-56, 
Sasso Barisano, 75100 Matera

Exhibition of paintings and three-dimensional works. Presentation of artist’s book “Mythologies 2009 – Rea Zoe Stavropoulos”, with paintings and texts by the artist, written to accompany the exhibition in Matera and produced in a limited edition of 120, each signed and numbered by the artist. “Born in Athens and brought up in London, British artist, Rea Stavropoulos, currently lives and works in Florence. The works in the exhibition explore through words and images her identity as  a woman and the different cultures, languages and landscapes within which she lives. There are large and small works, in watercolour, charcoal, oil and mixed media, images of strong women, myths and archetypes linked to the cycle of nature or anguished, dreaming, angry, floating, dancing women who give a sense of the fleeting and fragmentary and reflect the life of a contemporary cultural nomad and the complexities of being a woman today.
She was inspired by her first visit to Matera. Seeing names as shaping destinies, she interprets the city’s origins  – Mitera - (Mi- Terra) - Mother – Madre –Matter – Materia. She finds, in the habitations dug out of the rock and deeply rooted in the earth, parallels with women’s bodies. In their expansion and contraction, penetrable and impenetrable, the most ancient tufo habitats in the history of humanity maintain their secrets. As in “The Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino, Matera is, for Rea Stavropoulos, a place of dreams and discoveries, an allegory, a fiction.”   

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