RIPARO

Shelter/Repair

 

2019

with texts by Silvia Litardi and Giulia Anita Bari and stories collected by Marco Stefanelli

 

at the Pastificio Cerere Foundation

 

The artist intends to investigate the concept of shelter as a pre-architectural space, the most embryonic form of human protection. In this sense the carpet - the central theme of the exhibition - responds to man's primitive need to get warm, to protect himself, to rest, to wrap the deceased or to contain goods during travel; but above all it is a sacred perimeter, a space protected against the precariousness and the unknown. The carpet is the home of the homeless: it has spanned millennia and embraced numerous populations, starting from nomadic tribes and arriving up to the present day.

 

Furthermore, the short film The city and the sky will be presented in which the story of a group of men and women of different ages and geographical origins who find themselves among the ruins of an abandoned village in Aspromonte in Calabria and try to to "make home", repair and re-weave a sense of community.

 

The exhibition opens with the installation in the courtyard of the Pastificio Cerere, the result of the self-narration and sound experimentation workshop promoted by the La Frangia association and held by the artist in collaboration with Marco Stefanelli, Giulia Anita Bari and Ginevra Sammartino. The students of the "Piaget - Diaz" State Higher Education Institute of Rome and young women and men of various nationalities were involved thanks to the collaboration with InMigrazione, Ali and Civico Zero. Starting from the theme of the carpet and the symbols contained in it, the participants reflected on the concept of "home" in its many meanings through the creation of clay artefacts and the production of audio narratives which, knotted together, will compose a sound carpet.

This is followed by the Sekine video installation, a projection in a suitcase filled with salt and a room with a site-specific work of carpets made out of colored and fragrant spices to evoke different cultures and traditions. Furthermore, the short film The city and the sky will be presented in which the story of a group of men and women of different ages and geographical origins who find themselves among the ruins of an abandoned village, in the Calabrian Aspromonte, and attempt to " making a home”, repairing and re-weaving a sense of community.

The video takes strength and inspiration from the reading of the texts of anthropologists and writers such as Vito Teti and Franco Arminio who describe abandoned places as spaces that are not merely geographical but places of a "poetics of the margin". The work was also born from the artist's meeting with some operators from Doctors for Human Rights active in Calabria and Basilicata in a project against the exploitation of foreign workers in agriculture.

 

This courageous humanity, moving among the dust of the shacks, encounters the poetics of Guendalina Salini: the artist repopulates the voids which - first of all - are internal and it is precisely from the interior that something new can regenerate. The salt with which the artist draws a carpet thus becomes a symbolic element of a recalled spirituality to imagine together a new sense of community and belonging even when one no longer has shelter.