Farm Foundation
In the last 20 years, Farm has invested in urban regeneration, education, arts and culture.
About the Founders
Notary Andrea Bartoli and lawyer Florinda Saieva, an art-collecting couple who have a great passion for contemporary culture and a dream of improving small portions of the world. As parents of two girls, they longed to do something to halt the dereliction and marginality of their town. They didn't wait for someone to change their city, but decided to dedicate their whole lives to a great transformation process. The Bartoli family proposed a regeneration project to renovate the existing structures.
Thus, in 2010 Farm Cultural Park was born.
“We would not cry, we would not expect anyone to change our lives for us, but we would do everything in our power to make Favara a nicer city, for us, for our little girls, for everyone”.
Florinda e Andrea
A Platform For Change
Farm Cultural Park is a genuine workshop, a hothouse of social innovation. It’s a space in which a community of locals and creative talents work on problems and intervention strategies, seeking to make the most of their resources, to reuse, regenerate, reinterpret, revitalise and cultivate.
Our main objective is to create cultural transformations in urban places to show the possibilities of human creativity while targeting today’s challenges and opportunities.
Located less than 10 km from Agrigento, in the town of Favara, with a population of around 30,000 people, and an old centre that was thriving from prehistoric times but in recent times had fallen to severe depopulation due to lack of opportunities for young people and families. We saw the opportunity to create a new path out and halt the general decay of the structural, social and economic downfall of the city by breathing new life through art and architecture.
‘For a town that until yesterday was unknown even among Sicilians, this is a small miracle. In an Italy of abandoned villages, Favara is going against the trend, and it’s using its past as a foundation to build a future rooted in the breathtaking energy of art and culture.”
With the motivation of Award winning successes, we are opening a second Farm in Mazzarino. Each location has its own series of experimental research project, laboratory, and creative production on the themes of arts, education, the environment, place-city making.
Farm in the Treccani Encyclopaedia
Farm Cultural Park told by Prof. Ludovico Solima is included in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Art published by Treccani, under the heading "Museum of Contemporary Art" and in particular on the fundamental role of museums for the cultural growth of the community, as enshrined in the definition of the ICOM (International Council of Museums) and on the evaluation of the social and economic impact of museums, Farm Cultural Park is chosen as a paradigmatic experience.
Farm Cultural Park was winner of countless awards including the prestigious award of the homonymous American foundation Curry Stone Design Prize, as one of the 100 international experiences that have produced the greatest social impact in the world in the last ten years and the Human Design City Award of the City of Seoul.
