MUSABA in progress…the perfect balance between art, architecture and landscape.
We committed ourselves to building MUSABA, which today has gained recognition and offers an image of dynamism in artistic endeavour and culture that is not found anywhere else. Our efforts, our love of beauty and art, and our lack of prejudice in our pursuit of what we believe to be right, even though it may be against the prevailing current. We lead our lives in parallel, suspended between work and shared interests.
Each of us has a role”. There are undoubtedly other priorities in life, but if we don’t pay attention to culture, we risk becoming increasingly impoverished.” Together, Nik and Kiske live in the absolute necessity for creative expression, which all too often clashes horns with ignorance, bureaucracy, politics and institutions. Freedom against the rules, imagination against obscurantism. Artists, in any case, are rebels by definition.
Nik and Hiske hear the same things, but Nik hears only with the heart and the imagination, which can hear much further. Nik has been deaf since he was a child, and it is well known that the deaf suffer terribly from their enforced isolation, especially those who lack inner spiritual or cultural resources. For Nik, however, deafness was the means which allowed him to sharpen his sensibility and “hear” the voices of colours, fantasy and history.
Nik: what is art to me.
“It’s a parallel life in the infinite universe, where light, shapes and colours are part of a material and spiritual architecture, motivated and bathed in the solar spectrum; they collide and explore, from fundamental to complementary, creating a three-dimensional dimension; the essence, the abstraction of life, the unknown.”

 

Talent
Nik Spatari’s enormous creative talent and his ability to fuse different cultures, his love for Calabria. A lot of people have talent and enthusiasm, and many of them never get anywhere. Natural talent is like an athlete’s strength. You can be born with greater or lesser ability, but no-one can become an athlete because he is born fast or strong. What makes an artist is work, dedication and technique. The intelligence we are born with is just a gift…to make something of it we have to turn our minds into a precision instrument.
Every work of art is aggressive. And the life of every artist is a small or large war, beginning with the war with himself and his own limitations. To reach any goal, first and foremost you need ambition and then talent, knowledge and, finally, opportunities.
Despite local incomprehension, everything was planned: the creation of the Mediterranean Art Gardens, the accesses, the square, the roads & paths, the residential area. Although the local hostility for years did everything to obstruct the realisation of this operation in the Torbido valley, visitors now can discover the landscaper, the architect, the sculptor, the painter, the defender of nature.
Spatari’s formidable control of structures, of innovative restoration techniques while taking inspiration from the environment and Mediterranean heritage. A museum park reflecting his ideas of symbiosis between man and nature, connubio between history and contemporary art and architecture. With the restoration/renovation of the historical ex monastic complex, dating from 1100, and its integration into the spectacular new interventions, designed by Nik Spatari, the MuSaBa is moving with the times in the museum world suitable for contemporary museum policymaking and modern-day operational management and responding to the growing expectations of the public.
Artists in residence.

 

The ancient remains of the monastery, accentuates the new interventions and is in lovely contrast to the surprisingly spaces inside. The interior is a balanced variety of vast high-ceilinged colourful monumental spaces. Spatari intends are in organically integrating the old walls into a new and larger complex. Despite its monumental character, the new interventions maintain the human dimensions so characteristic of the former monastic complex. Massive installations or sizeable exhibitions as well as smaller projects can all be presented thanks to the variety of the exhibition areas.
Visiting-artists come and work here. In this way, new environmental works of art will be created in and around the museum. In addition, the MUSABA site (7 hectares) has grown enormously over the past decades: the new MuSaBaArtHotel (950 square meters) with its unique location, the new construction “Wind Rose” annex the museum (500 square meters), the monumental art works in the Mediterranean Gardens, the renovation of the old railway station and annex art laboratories and workshops (500 square meters), as well as the number of staff members. MUSABA wants to establish itself in the future as a park museum laboratory of highly significance.