Nik Spatari's Musaba: A Visionary Art Park in Calabria

Nik Spatari (1929–2020) was an Italian artist who created the Musaba, a museum-park-laboratory in Mammola, Calabria. Born in April 1929, he lost hearing and speech during childhood but became a self-taught artist. In 1955, at age 26, he held his first solo exhibition at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Reggio Calabria, showing about 200 works. He later moved to Lausanne and Paris, where he studied under Le Corbusier and developed Prismatism, a style using color decomposition. In 1966, he returned to Italy and founded Galleria Studio Hiske in Milan with his partner Hiske Maas. In the late 1970s, they began transforming an abandoned railway station in Santa Barbara near Mammola into the Musaba. The project includes the former station turned into a studio (resembling Le Corbusier's Ronchamp chapel), the church of Santa Barbara housing 'Sogno di Giacobbe' (called the 'Sistine Chapel of Calabria'), the Foresteria (started in 2004) with 11 artist cells and a mosaic cycle, and La Rosa dei Venti (built from 2008). The Fondazione Spatari/Maas, active since the 1980s, promotes culture and education, positioning Musaba as a revolutionary art center in the Mediterranean. Spatari's work remains understudied by critics.