La terra nostra è un mostro di mare is the exhibition, which opens the third chapter of the artistic programming of KORA-Contemporary Arts Center on the theme of inhabiting. The exhibition, curated by Claudio Zecchi and Paolo Mele opens the two-year-long research (2023-2025) on a complex and ever current topic, the Mediterranean, trying to investigate it from different perspectives. The exhibition will last one year and will be divided in different chapters. The themes of the home and village functioned over the last two years as a narrative device to question first the institutional dimension of a cultural center, which is devoted to art production and research on contemporary culture (Home Sweet Home – Exploring the living spaces, 2021-22), and on a conscious choice of a marginalized position as a privileged standpoint and as an instrument of cultural production with the ambition of calling into question the notions of center and periphery (Paint your own Village, 2022-23).

In this exhibition, the Mediterranean, intended as land and sea at the same time, a place of contrasts and contradictions, is proposed in the exhibition as a possible unit of measurement for a paradigm shift. Following this concept, all those peculiarities that may seem apparently unproductive and useless acquire value and broaden our imagination. Slowness, magic, folklore, superstition and tradition are therefore not a caricature of the world but become, or could become, lenses and tools of interpretation through which the experience we have of them can become richer, broader and plural. Voices, therefore, equally important, capable of pointing us to the unforeseen, unproductive, often non-programmable destinations, full of contradictions at the same time. The work Scarcagnuli by artists Riccardo Giacconi and Carolina Valencia Caicedo, which beginning gives the title of the exhibition, constantly shifts through the narration of personal stories that interweave with tradition, folklore and local rituals, the relationship between reality and fiction starting from a strong connection to the territory in which it was created: Capo di Leuca. The work not only widens the space-time boundaries, but calls into play the specificity of a geographical position which, as in the words of the fishermen of Leuca, is the beginning and the end at the same time, but also a place of destination and passage in the heart of the Mediterranean. Following this direction, the exhibition aims to question the relationship between land and sea, to reflect on how these two elements find a common ground or cause of tension at the same time, and on how, finally, the images produced by this relationship create an ever-changing and often indefinable landscape. A plan, capable of opening up to new horizons, offering itself to be interpreted and accessed by multiple suggestions and intuitions rather than obligatory paths. In this sense, the Mediterranean becomes a depository of possibilities and openness, a platform where terms like loss of control, fragility, mistakes, and things that remain in the shadow or left behind can become further alternatives of the human experience.The first chapter therefore attempt to build a geography of infidelity, a mapping in which, if on one hand the presence of the territory, the place of origin and its roots is strongly felt, the desire to get away from it is equally strong. And then to come back.

In this sense, the structure of the exhibition is circular: it opens and closes with two portraits, one choral (Scarcagnuli) and the other of a non-human living subject (Storia di un Albero). Works strongly contextualized in the Salento area but at the same time full of references that allude to a vaster human geography in constant tension between real and imaginary, generating ideas which, by escaping stratigraphic measurements, end up calling a decentralized and visionary space into question.

Scarcagnuli by Giacconi and Caicedo is a sound portrait that investigates the concept of extreme through a succession of personal stories that intertwine with the tradition and folklore of the place – Capo di Leuca – thus becoming universal.

The earth : flat The sea : flat by Hervé and Martinez, starting from the performance held in October 2022 at Parco Pozzelle in Catrignano de’ Greci, tells the ambiguity of the relationship between sea and land by mixing elements of truth (historical archives, photographs, prints etc.) to fictional elements with the intention of building a visual mental map that opens up the possibility of reinventing geography by writing a new history of the territory.

Seeds/ Si Siz by Ciancimino is a mapping of the plants that grow on the coasts (the seeds of the plants contain the memory of the plant species that change to naturalize on the rocks and sandy soils where they land). A map that takes new forms from time to time depending on the places that host it, thus drawing ever-changing routes; a jungle of instinctive signs that visually refers to the artist’s cultural origins influenced by Arab-Norman architectural decoration and Art Nouveau.

A complex geography, that of the Mediterranean, Favini tells us with Arrivederci (Au revoir), a crossroads of exchanges, battles, movement of people. Arrivederci (Au revoir) reflects on the suspended greetings that predict future meetings. The words draw perspective lines that look out to the sea, refer to identity, set boundaries that aren’t just physical. Arrivederci aspires to find future encounters, hoping to see the past in an imminent moment. 

But the Mediterranean is also a place of fractures: a place of a mortal frontier and at the same time of hope. With Sea grammar Lagomarsino visually translates it into a single image perforated at a constant rhythm by small holes which, in succession, produce a single large hole, source of a powerful light. The work thus invokes a powerful emotional regime concerning the disappearance of the Mediterranean, or the emergence of a different Mediterranean, in all its fractures, like a sea of lights. Finally, this controversial mapping returns to its starting point: the Salento area. Story of a Tree by Flatform, filmed in Tricase, is the portrait of a non-human living organism, a 900-year-old Quercia Vallonea (oak of the Hundred Knights), which despite its fixity becomes a witness to a place, to the stories that have crossed and of the languages that have followed one another – Arbaresh, Romanès, Griku, Byzantine Greek, Hebrew, Yiddish, Turkish, Spanish, French and Salento – as demonstrated by the dialogues of the film.