Portrait of Maratea: A Fusion of Faces and Landscapes

Portrait of Maratea is a work that narrates the territory and faces of Maratea. These are video portraits of faces, beaches, historical buildings, woods, rocks, assembled, mounted, and overlaid, and then hand-painted. A work on crossing, on wrinkles that become waves, on Christ that becomes a winged figure, on faces projected on the rocks that are mirrored in the sea. Commissioned by the Municipality of Maratea, the work of the master Franz Cerami was presented in Rome at the Ministry of Culture on the occasion of the audition of Maratea city finalist for the title of Italian Capital of Culture for the year 2026. The work was produced by Service 2 Service; the artist's assistant is Flavio Urbinati; the original soundtrack is by Claudio del Proposto; assistants to the shooting Danilo Cernicchiaro and Giuseppe Maimone; drone footage by Dimitri Sobolev. Portrait of Maratea is a storytelling project, the story of a community: a masterful game of fusion between people and places, a mix of traditional techniques and painting with oil paints and graphite, colors, lights, and the movement of spontaneous expressions of faces and bodies, images that cross and are crossed. Franz Cerami, to realize his work, spent a week in Maratea, and with his video camera, he portrayed, filmed, listened to the citizens of Maratea. Subsequently, his moving portraits were projected in different places of the territory, from the historic center to the port of Maratea, using the language of video mapping. Franz Cerami, divides his time between Rio de Janeiro and Naples, where he was born in 1963. In 2023, he was appointed for the third time Ambassador of Italian Design in the world by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. He was the Artistic Director of Monumedia, International Exhibition on Digital Languages applied to Cultural Heritage. He directed for ten years Corto Circuito, Festival of short audiovisual communication. He teaches Rhetoric and Digital Storytelling at the University Suor Orsola Benincasa of Naples and in Master and International Workshops. Cerami has produced and exhibited his works in the cities of Naples, Rome, Palermo, Paris, St. Petersburg, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Milan, Yerevan, Tirana, São Paulo, Marrakech, Sarajevo, Kuala Lumpur. Among his most notable works, in addition to Lighting Flowers, are: the Magica installation created for the Voiello brand at the Castel dell'Ovo in Naples, Miss Digital World installation on virtual beauty; video mapping installations Cam Portraits and Ovo Mapping Faces; the light installation Lipstick Portraits and the site-specific installation Eggs & Skulls, commissioned by the Madre Museum in Naples, the work Red Venus created for the Mann - Archaeological Museum of Naples and then acquired and exhibited in the permanent Collection of the Farnesina; the permanent work of portraits Denzolu, produced for the Municipality of Corigliano Rossano; the Lumina installation created in Sarajevo on the facade of the Academy of Fine Arts; in addition Remix Portraits created in São Paulo, Naples, and Yerevan and the permanent work T2 Portraits created for the Milan Malpensa Airport.