AGUANTE is a project by the artist Giovanni de Cataldo, promoted by the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in partnership with MUNTREF – Museos de la Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero in Buenos Aires, and winner of the fourteenth edition of the Italian Council, a program promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture, which allocates funds for cultural projects supporting the production, promotion, and support of contemporary art abroad.
Giovanni de Cataldo (Rome, 1990) has had his studio inside Pastificio Cerere in the San Lorenzo district since 2014, where he has developed and consolidated his artistic language within the crossroads of artists and ideas that have characterized the former factory since the 1970s. This legacy has been embraced and amplified by the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere which, since its establishment in 2004, has been committed to promoting research and experimentation among young artists. Participation in the Italian Council program represents a significant milestone in de Cataldo’s professional journey and is fully aligned with the Foundation’s mission, serving as a strategic opportunity to enhance the artist’s work both nationally and internationally.
De Cataldo’s artistic research focuses on the urban environment, from which he directly extracts elements that he then reworks through various languages, including new technologies applied to sculpture. By taking everyday objects directly from the street—such as guard rails damaged in crash tests, benches, and fountains—the artist explores the limits and potential of matter. In recent years, his work has expanded to include the analysis of the sociological and anthropological contexts in which subcultures—such as that of the ultras—emerge and evolve, as well as the diverse languages that populate cities.
AGUANTE will unfold between 2025 and 2027 through a series of national and international events, culminating in August 2027 with the acquisition of the works by the collection of the Museo di Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto.
Among the scheduled events are two solo exhibitions by the artist: one in Buenos Aires at MUNTREF – Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, part of the Museos de la Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (March–April 2027), and one in Rome at the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, curated by Marcello Smarrelli (May–July 2027).
The project relies on an international network of cultural partners: Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City); Salotto/Accurat, an Italian-American cultural center based in New York; Alberdi Residencia, a creative hub and artists’ residency in Córdoba (Argentina); SOMA, an artist-founded platform for art education in Mexico City; and Blueproject Foundation, a contemporary art foundation based in Barcelona and active across Europe. Each partner will contribute to the valorization and international dissemination of the project through exhibitions, residencies, meetings, and educational initiatives.
AGUANTE investigates the connections between South American football fandom and migration to Italy, starting from the very word that gives the project its title, aguante. The term—transferred in the 19th century from sailors’ jargon to that of the hinchadas (popular supporter groups born in Argentina in the 1960s)—has come to symbolize collective identity, belonging, resilience, and unwavering loyalty to the colors and the flag, in every place and circumstance, especially in the face of exhaustion, hunger, thirst, conflict, and defeat.
De Cataldo’s research—developed across stadiums, archives, and football clubs founded by Italian migrants—will bring to light micro-histories, cultural syncretisms, and mixed languages, revealing links between football, memory, and community. Starting from Buenos Aires, it will extend across other regions of Argentina, from Córdoba to Santiago de Chile and Río Negro, with particular attention to supporter groups born within Italian immigrant communities.
The collected material will be used to produce 8 large-scale tapestries (up to 5 meters wide), a visual map of a transnational identity that echoes supporters’ banners and underscores the sacredness of football, accompanied by a video documentary and a publication edited by Yogurt.
> In September 2025, Giovanni de Cataldo began his project with a trip to Argentina, a country where numerous football clubs were founded by Italians. His first stops were Buenos Aires and the Alberdi Residencia in Córdoba. On 20 November 2025, at the end of his residency at Alberdi Residencia in Córdoba, de Cataldo presented the performative documentary “Que golpe para la envidia” during a pop-up exhibition at Previa los viltas, a historic gathering place for football fans in the Alberdi neighborhood.
[Watch here some excerpts from the work Que golpe para la envidia]
> On Saturday, 11 April 2026, at 3:30 PM, the Museo di Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto hosted Previa, a talk, documentary screening, and temporary exhibition presented as part of AGUANTE. During the event, the first results of the research were presented, alongside a documentary screening and a temporary display of three tapestries dedicated to the previa. Introduced by Marcello Smarrelli, Artistic Director of Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, and moderated by Saverio Verini, Director of the Civic Museums of Spoleto, the event featureed a conversation between the artist, journalist Valerio Curcio, and writer and art critic Teresa Macrì.
> On Wednesday, 20 May at 6:00 pm, Blueproject Foundation in Barcelona presented El Clásico de las Colectividades, a temporary exhibition by Giovanni de Cataldo, curated by Renato Della Poeta and organised in collaboration with Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, on view at Espai II through 22 May 2026.
Starting from the historic rivalry between Deportivo Español and Sportivo Italiano, football clubs founded by the Spanish and Italian immigrant communities in Buenos Aires, the exhibition explores the territories where migrant identity, popular devotion and Argentine football culture merge into a collective ritual. Between the pitch and the stands, football support becomes an experience of belonging, memory and resistance.
The exhibition features four large tapestries suspended from iron bars and balanced by counterweights made of everyday objects, evoking a fragile equilibrium that becomes a metaphor for the bonds that sustain the weight of history. Among the images depicted are Gauchito Gil, the popular folk saint of the Guaraní tradition and protector of football supporters, and references to the previa, the communal gathering that precedes the match, highlighting the relationship between devotion, belonging and collective ritual.
The exhibition concludes with an excerpt from the documentary Aguante, which travels through stadiums, archives and football clubs founded by migrant communities along a route stretching from Patagonia to Buenos Aires, conveying the deeper meaning of aguante.
[Read El Clasico de las Colectividades’ press release]
> On Monday, June 22nd at 3:00 PM, the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City hosted the lecture El ritual del Aguante: Ecos italianos en la fiesta del fútbol argentino. The event invited reflection on the intersection of contemporary visual research and the social anthropology of football fandom, employed as frameworks for understanding the processes of community building and the forms of collective resistance that run through popular culture. Artist Giovanni de Cataldo presented a selection from his video-documentary dedicated to Argentine football fan culture, accompanied by an overview of his broader artistic research practice. The discussion, moderated by Universidad Iberoamericana researcher Jorge Negroe, brought together three leading scholars in the fields of sociology and anthropology of football: Pablo Alabarces, Roger Magazine, and Sergio Fernández González.
[Read El ritual del Aguante: Ecos italianos en la fiesta del fútbol argentino‘s press release]
> Thursday, June 25 – At the conclusion of his residency at SOMA, Giovanni de Cataldo presented an excerpt from the documentary accompanying the project AGUANTE.
SOMA is an artist-run organization based in Mexico City dedicated to artistic education, fostering dialogue and collaboration among artists and cultural practitioners across generations and disciplines through educational programs, residencies, and public events. During the presentation, de Cataldo shared the research developed throughout the residency with SOMA’s students, researchers, and community, introducing the project through a documentary that traces its process, encounters, and reflections. The screening was followed by a public conversation exploring the project’s investigation of stadiums, archives, and football clubs founded by Italian and other migrant communities. Bringing together microhistories, cultural syncretism, and linguistic hybridities, AGUANTE reveals the deep connections between football, memory, and community.
> Wednesday, July 8th, from 6:00 to 9:00 PM, Salotto presents Cabeza dura: un Tano en América, a temporary exhibition by Giovanni de Cataldo, hosted at Secret Futebol Club in Brooklyn, New York. The exhibition, structured around a series of tapestries and a site-specific installation, weaves together two central universes in Latin American culture: popular devotion and football fandom.
Marble takes center stage in the exhibition, a material that has always evoked eternity and memory, here explored instead in its humblest form: waste. The artist sifted through the discarded remnants of marble workers in East Williamsburg, salvaging fragments destined for the landfill and restoring to them a latent sacredness. Through a process of assemblage, these blocks are transformed into small architectures that take on the function of altars or domestic shrines.
Within these structures of raw stone, the icons of Latin American popular devotion find their place: Gauchito Gil, Santa Muerte, Jesus Malverde. The cult of Gauchito Gil, also celebrated in one of the tapestries, has always united a passion for sport with a notion of alternative justice — a bond now mirrored in the marble itself. The tapestries, meanwhile, portray fans in their moments of ritual: sacrifice, the ecstasy of victory, homage to one’s own “patron saint.”
A trajectory that begins with football fandom and popular devotion, only to touch on universal themes of identity, memory, and collectivity.
