Contemporary art therapies for Euganean Spa hotels
‘In Treatment’ was a system action for the innovation of the regional tourism offer. The companies involved, seven hotels in the Euganean Spas, welcomed seven contemporary artists whose curatorial choice and artistic work focused on a particular production process – treatment – and on the material that makes it possible and distinctive – mud.
The seven artists-in-residence have filtered the material and the process through their poetics, mobilising the different languages of contemporary art. Their gaze penetrates and dissects the therapy of mud but at the same time becomes symbolic therapy towards the productive context that hosts them.
To be ‘in treatment’, it is no longer only the guests, but the hotel company itself that is invited to a similar therapeutic path of analysis and reflection on itself, on what makes it distinctive, on how it represents itself but also on what it tends not to show: the mud, precisely, and in particular the production process that converts it into a therapeutic treatment.
The works of the artists who have been in residence in the seven hotels give new light and visibility to an extraordinary competitive advantage of spa tourism and place it on the perceptive map of new targets. The intervention and presence of contemporary art suggest a possible re-positioning of spa hotel hospitality and speak to a public that chooses its destinations also on the basis of the aesthetic and intellectual stimulus they offer.
The exhibition ‘In Treatment’ develops through seven different hotels in the thermal resorts of Abano and Montegrotto Terme, a sensorial, visual and emotional journey with works by the artists Alessio Ballerini, Daniela Di Maro, Elena Candeo, Giacomo Gerboni, Giorgia Severi, Marco Maria Zanin and Simona Sala spread throughout the spaces of the hotels of Hotel Terme all’Alba, Hotel Smeraldo, Hotel Dolomiti, Hotel Gran Torino, Hotel Belvedere, Hotel Eliseo and Hotel Terme Commodore.
‘The result was the creation of an exhibition spread throughout the area that we hope will attract a different public from the one that usually frequents these structures and can also be a tool for relaunching the sector’ (F. Panozzo).
The exhibition, with the process that preceded it, is configured as an innovative tourism product developed by ‘Fondazione Università Ca Foscari with the project ’MACC – Manifattura Commercio e Cultura. Transforming the authenticity of the Veneto region into a tourist experience‘ thanks to the POR FSE 2014-2020 contribution of the Veneto Region, in collaboration with the Aquaehotels Consortium of Abano Terme and the patronage of the municipalities of Abano and Montegrotto’.