On Friday 12 April 2024 at 7.00 pm at the Kora – Centro del Contemporaneo spaces, located in the baronial palace of Gualtieris in Castrignano de’ Greci, Via Vittorio Emanuele 19, the inauguration of the exhibition “La terra nostra è un mostro di mare 2” will take place “.
With the second installation of “La terra nostra è un mostro di mare“, the third exhibition cycle that KORA – Centro del Contemporaneo has dedicated to the theme of living closes. Curated by Claudio Zecchi and Paolo Mele, the exhibition seeks to delve deeper into a complex and ever-current theme such as that of the Mediterranean, trying to investigate it from different perspectives. The house and the village have acted over these years as narrative devices aimed at questioning the instituting dimension of a Center for production and research on the contemporary (Home Sweet Home – explorations of living, 2021-22) and on the conscious choice of a position of marginality as a privileged observatory and tool of cultural production with the ambition of calling into question the notions of center and periphery (Parla del tuo villaggio, 2022-23). In this exhibition the Mediterranean, understood as land and sea at the same time, a place of contrasts and contradictions, is proposed as a possible unit of measurement and hypothesis of a paradigm shift. Following this line, all those peculiarities that may seem apparently unproductive and useless take on value and broaden our imagination.
The artwork of Riccardo Giacconi and Carolina Valencia Caicedo Scarcagnuli, whose incipit gives the exhibition its title, constantly shifts, through the telling of personal stories that are intertwined with tradition, folklore and local rites, the relationship between reality and fiction starting from a strong connection to the territory in which it was created: the Capo di Leuca. The work not only broadens the space-time boundaries, but brings into play the specificity of a geographical positioning which, as the fishermen of Santa Maria di Leuca say, is at the same time the beginning and the end, but also a landing space and passage in the heart of the Mediterranean.
Following this direction, the exhibition intends to reason and question the relationship between the land and the sea, how these two elements find points of agreement but at the same time disagreement and tension, and how, finally, the images produced by this relationship create a continuously evolving and often indefinable landscape. A plan capable of opening up new imaginaries, offering a multiplicity of accesses made up of suggestions and intuitions rather than obligatory paths. The Mediterranean becomes, in this sense, a repository of possibilities and openings; a platform in which loss of control, fragility, shadows, stumbles and rejections can become further possibilities of the human experience.
If with the first exhibition we attempted to construct a geography of infidelity, a mapping in which the tension between the place of origin and the desire to move away from it was strongly felt, following an optimistic impulse, with the second, a shift in meaning through which the migratory phenomena produced by current political and social models are often the result of failure and not of social redemption. Like the first installation, the second also retains a circular structure, opening and closing on the coasts of the Salento coast with two works, Scarcagnuli and Parata per il paesaggio, which intertwine tradition, mythology and landscape.
Artist in the exhibition: Andreco, Riccardo Giacconi, Carolina Valencia Caicedo, Gabriella Ciancimino, Luca Coclite, Elena Mazzi, Rosario Sorbello, Alessandro Sciarroni.
