2019 Candela masseria di Torre Bianca (Fg)
Materials: Bricks, straw, basil, tomatos, eggplant, chili peppers, barattini (Cucumis melo from the cucumber family), pumpkins
Dimensions: m 24 x 12 x h. max 0,4
my name is… il mio nome è…
Know the other and their relity
Testimonials collected and elaborated by: G. Baldasarre, P. Bevilacqua, A. Mentana, E. A. Moscaritolo
With the indispensable contribution of the Coop. Iris (SPRAR “Vulnerabili” e “Free entry”)
The narration has been entrusted to the voice of P. Bevilacqua and A. Correro (Piccola Compagnia Impertinente).
The journey in the reality of others, the one that is never ours, always too far from the satisfied garden of our own lives, whose everyday existence worries us, often with some strain, only in the short span of time that accompanies a television report or the reading of a newspaper article, continues: within the “Trame Rurali” project of the “ArcheoLogica e Masserie di Puglia” — a project aimed at the conservation and future development of rural traditions — with the collaboration of the Puglia Region, the Province of Foggia, the Municipality of Candela. Maria Dompè expands the need for this encounter between realities, developed with the project called “my name is… il mio nome è… Conosci l’altro e la sua realtà” (Know the other and their reality) first in Rome, then in Naples, and now the third stage in an enormous and historical “masseria” (ancient farming estate) in the Apulian countryside. It is here that the artist, in the summer of this year, among the sun-drenched walls of a place that gives the impression of being a medieval stronghold, felt the need to stop. The glance of a Nigerian child playing in the outside courtyard of the farmhouse was all the artist needed to understand that she was experiencing a moment of predestination. She could have quickened or slowed her steps, but in one way or another, she would have found herself keeping an appointment with destiny, the same that guided her through those spaces beyond time, anxiously awaiting her arrival, in order to feel complete.
Seen from above, the best perspective to display its perfect geometry, the environmental work appears as a garden, a dreamlike vision dressed in a shimmering dress, whose shapes evoke medieval rosettes; their overall coloring, perceivable in a glance all together, is achieved by making use of the generous offer of “sora nostra madre terra” (sister our mother earth): vegetables with lively pigmentation are among the first decorative elements of a scenography that is placed in continuum with the host structure; more specifically, the contours that delimit the display surface are made from the arrangement of rough bricks, which, from their raw-material roughness, recall the same asperity of the walls that frame the inner space of the farm. Everything, in the sign of a project that is nature, and that will have to return to nature, once its time is over: Maria Dompè, as an act of thanksgiving to a fragile social dimension, a group already damaged by the blows of ill-fated events, decides to create an artistic work under the sign of cyclicality: the parts that make up the work have been redistributed to those who, even if with initial distrust (the natural consequences of a life spent in continuous defense) have agreed to tell their story through the pens of Giovanna Baldasarre, Pierluigi Bevilacqua, Annalisa Mentana and Enza Moscaritolo, who were immediately ready to welcome and to transform into stories the testimony of women, mothers, and warriors; unique in their personalities, but bound together by the invisible thread of survival. Thus, one finds oneself catapulted into a centrifuge of conflicting reactions, signs of the most diverse ways to metabolize pain, which sees as the pre-chosen target that stereotyped and crystalized feminine universe in the categories of weakness, delicacy, conditionability; however, ready to fall at the first gust of wind, to reveal a force that goes beyond the human.
An appeal to the direct knowledge of others, of which art is the spokesperson in the form of the environmental work of Dompè, created in the Masseria-Posta Torre Bianca of Candela, which is now a collective structure that houses refugee women and children (SPRAR, managed by the IRIS cooperative), but, in antiquity, was a place of transhumance and repose for herds and shepherds, who were moving livestock along the trail: the ancient role of hospitality is, therefore, re-proposed, and extended as a bridge between two apparently distant worlds, with the aim of guiding them on the way to peaceful coexistence and constructive intercultural exchange.
Valentina Pagano