Enel Contemporanea, the public art project launched by Enel in 2007, proposes a series of works every year by artists of international renown. The aim is to use contemporary art to stimulate public opinion on a highly topical theme, directing the attention of spectators and the media to the use of energy, in its various articulations, as a "sustainable" and "renewable" source. Thanks to their acknowledged capacity for research and innovation, the artists and their installations help highlight and popularise the route already embarked upon by Enel in this direction.
After the popular and critical success of Enel Contemporanea 2007, with artistic installations by Angela Bulloch, Jeppe Hein and Patrick Tuttofuoco, the 2008 edition, once again curated by Francesco Bonami, probes into the fabric of two Italian cities - Rome and Venice - and looks at the unexplored energy of Time in its various manifestations: playing, imagining, waiting. Three interconnected themes which say something about the meaning of energy in today's society, where modes of entertaining, meeting and exchanging ideas sometimes take on new and surprising forms. Diverse places and events can create connections between thoughts and energies in a huge modern-day forum, where they wait to be transformed into our future identity.
The three artists - assume vivid astro focus, A12 and Jeffrey Inaba - all have different ways of using various invisible forms of energy like Playing, Imagining and Waiting, which together help us understand what it means to be contemporary and our role within the unstoppable flow of the present.
