QUI. Kora marks the official opening of the KORA Contemporary Public Museum.
Established in 2022, the Museum represents one of the vital souls of KORA – Contemporary Arts Center. In constant dialogue with the Library, it serves as a space for research and cultural production, ready to engage with heterogeneous languages, themes, and perspectives.
Over the years, the Museum has explored central issues of the contemporary era, with a gaze rooted in the Salento territory yet open to international dynamics. Among the themes addressed most systematically are the concept of the “limit”—understood as a threshold from which perspectives can be overturned—and that of “dwelling”, analyzed across various scales: from the “House”, the Palazzo Baronale de Gualtieriis, which we inhabit daily as a privileged outpost and observatory, to the “Village”, a fragile territory through which to imagine new and delicate balances, and finally to the “Mediterranean”, a complex political and cultural crossroads that recent history compels us to observe with increasing attention.
QUI.Kora, the title of the opening exhibition, is part of this journey. The title is inspired by Richard McGuire’s1 namesake graphic novel2, in which a single point of view—that of a room—becomes the frame through which to simultaneously observe events occurring at vastly different moments in time, in a collapse of time and space. On the graphic novel one reads:
“Here is yesterday, it is now, it is always. It is the story of a place and what has happened there over hundreds of thousands of years; it is a single narrative composed of moments near and far, intertwined, locked together, and overlapping; it is the dense weave of the history of this world, taking shape in front of the fixed perspective of the corner of a living room.”
Much like in the graphic novel, the exhibition recounts a space, a place, and a territory that, in these first few years, has acted as a collector of stories—rethought, reformulated, and visually re-proposed through the gaze and actions of the artists who have inhabited, activated, and crossed it over time.
Re-installed through this lens, the works testify to the plurality of perspectives the Museum has chosen to embrace as a critical key. This approach traverses different media and sensibilities to identify unexpected meanings that have not yet fully emerged. For this reason, Qui.Kora is not intended as a celebration of work already accomplished, but as a tool for imagining new forms of relationship. The Museum’s recent past thus becomes the starting point for questioning the present and the territory as living places in constant transformation—a condition that does not close the circle but rather opens up to new interpretations, new encounters, and unprecedented directions of research.
The set up of the works does not follow a linear chronological criterion: sometimes dissonant relationships and multiple perspectives find their synthesis in a device where fragmentation and an apparent distance between the works give life to unusual, or not always declared, overlaps and juxtapositions (G. Paolini3), lending the exhibition a heterogeneous rhythm and pace. “A film must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order,” as Godard used to say. The same applies to this exhibition, where time is an illusion and where it is possible to access it from any point, creating new stories and new visual combinations with their own narrative meaning from time to time.
The spectator also contributes to this form of new storytelling; active in their role, they become a sort of co-author: they intervene in this “magma” and, through a combinatory action, make a dialogue between past, present, and future possible, freely stitching together the relationship between space and time.
But why should it still be necessary to tell stories today? What makes them relevant? How do they embed themselves into the “flesh” of a place, or into the programming of an institution dedicated to cultural production in remote, marginal, or fragile territories? Why, precisely today—when the economy prevails in current debate, flattening or nullifying the complexities of the world in which we live—should it be necessary to return to the intimacy of a story?
One possible answer lies in this brief yet incisive editorial from MOUSSE4:
Because “the problematic implies a terrain to be shared under the aegis of perplexity,” as philosopher Isabelle Stengers points out in her 2023 book Making Sense in Common […]. And because stories help us “to make sense of the world and to act in it,” writes Christina Sharpe in Ordinary Notes (2023).
[…]
When we claim that fiction is, quite literally, fiction, we might be wide of the mark. Working with an inventory of emotions, fiction weaves through the heart’s geographies: storms of the century, crying stars, hummable moods that wash over us, highs so high or lows so low we renegotiate cans and cannots. Fiction itches us to get away, while its stoking fire lures us to stay a little longer. Is it about practicing character development? Playing our own shrink? Adding a spring to our step? Articulating the impossible, in times of adversity? In the name of whatever it is, fiction has a distinctive way to kiss and tell.
The exhibition, however, brings with it further questions and attempts to raise critical issues within the meshes of visual language. Why host an exhibition on the power of narratives at a time when, through our devices, we are besieged by images themselves—whether real or artificially constructed—each of which, ultimately, tells a story? With what tools do we choose and consume them without remaining passive? With what timing do we enjoy them?
Perhaps because narration, storytelling, fiction (or truth?), and the enjoyment of long, dilated timeframes are a possible way of acting on the threshold; they are an attempt at disobedience, an abandonment of logical coherence and the order of the “map” through a positioning on an evocative and emotional plane. This plane welcomes randomness and the emergence of doubt as a process of transformation and the overturning of perspective, as well as an opening to a multiplicity of perspectives. Precisely for this reason, the exhibition presents itself as a stage, an artifact of real life, a multimedia device of an analog nature in which the spectator traverses, on various levels, stories they already know, but even more so, those they do not. Better yet, the spectator becomes an author themselves, adding further layers of interpretation to the stories. In this way, truth and fiction become the completion of one another: in this case, possibilities and fiction are not the opposite of reality, but a way to tell us something more about it.
The exhibited works comes, in most cases, from the oral tradition. They reach us through processes of exchange and confrontation between the artists, the territory, and its inhabitants. They are stories of folk culture that originate from some distant source and get lost in time, adding new, uncontrollable meanings. This unstoppable process of change makes them all plausible and therefore, within this new framework, paradoxically real. As James Ellroy says: “only a scrupulous verisimilitude is capable of putting everything back into perspective.”
Following this path, it can be stated that the context in which the individual works were born remains clear and specific; yet, at the moment when new connections and new narratives5 are created, a work born in a small context of Southern Italy is no longer just the visual, emotional, and conceptual representation of that specific setting. Instead, it can embody the characteristics of many other “Souths,” of many other peripheries, and of many other extremes with specificities similar to our own.
Today, through HERE—and in the future, through subsequent set-up—the Kora Contemporary Public Museum serves as the tool through which we will attempt to orient (or disorient) ourselves. By adding further hypotheses of truth to this initial one, we transform the stories the works tell into a “real” story. For this to be possible, all of us, as the public, are called upon to make a decision—to choose, if necessary, <<what is real and what is not, bringing reality to a state of crisis and producing further ruptures in the intertwining of reality and fiction. In doing so, the coherence of the narrated world, in all its forms and modes, will become more important than its coherence with the real world>>.
Hello, do we know each other? Welcome! Today I will show you my home.
At the moment I am in the park at the edge of the village. In this place, everyone knows one another.
People spend their days drinking coffee in local cafés or walking through the surrounding woods. It is a simple life!
[…]
There is a genuine sense of belonging and trust.
I can’t wait to show it to you.
[…]
This is where I lived most of my childhood.
The building—or the castle—or my home—choose the name yourself6.
