Sino alla fine del mare

Everything escapes us

The exhibition is curated by Claudio Zecchi and Paolo Mele

29th of Jube – 7th of September

From Monday to Friday: 10.00-13.00 / 18.00-20.00; Saturday by appointment

Opening 29th of June 19.00

The title, taken from the notebook Memorie di Adriano by Marguerite Yourcenar, speaks to the topic of the memory and its renegotiation through the mechanism of narration. This is the fil rouge of the four works presented.

Says Yourcenar: «Everything escapes us. All. Even ourselves. My very existence, if I had to tell it in writing I would reconstruct with difficulty as if it were that of another. […] Whatever you do, you always reconstruct the monument in your own way. The stones of reality are only the starting point. Every being who has lived the human adventure is me».

From different perspectives, the four works re-call the idea of memory through the formal mechanisms of verisimilitude as strategies that calls into question the possibility of a new reality.

Artists and works on display: Lia Cecchin, OLGA (Outdoor Lab for Gathering the Absence); Romina De Novellis, Arachne; Riccardo Giacconi e Carolina Valencia Caicedo, Scarcagnuli; Elena Mazzi e Rosario Sorbello, En Route to the South – parallel migrations.

The exhibition is supported by Apulia Region.

All artworks have been supported by SIAE | Sillumina Copia privata per i giovani, per la cultura e MiBAC.

Ramdom is pleased to announce that since June 10th the publication Sino alla Fine del Mare. Investigation on the extreme lands will be distributed. The book is a project by Ramdom, published by Viaindustriae.

What are Extreme Lands? Extreme compared to what? How can we narrate them? What happens when the vision of the locals everyday’s life mingle with that of the artists coming from other places? Can we consider the extreme lands, or more generally what is peripheral and marginal, a methodology per se? The extreme lands invited us to investigate a state of infinite and complex relationships in which marginality becomes a parameter capable of questioning and rethinking the notion of the center both as a geographical place and as a place of artistic or cultural production.

Until the end of the Sea, tries to answer these questions narrating some stages of interdisciplinary research known under the name of Investigation of the Extreme Lands launched by Ramdom in 2014.

Until the end of the Sea, aims to focus on a five-year long-term research on the theme of the so-called Extreme Lands of which Ramdom has become over time a privileged observatory. The book is a sort of database and a tool for investigating and spreading the results so far obtained through the intervention of professionals in different disciplines whose goal is to build a new cognitive mapping of the land’s end.

Starting from the specific case of Gagliano del Capo and Basso Salento, the book becomes a universal device capable of creating an ideal bridge with similar geo-anthropological situations. In addition to the artists involved – Elena Mazzi e Rosario Sorbello; Romina De Novellis; Lia Cecchin; Riccardo Giacconi e Carolina Valencia Caicedo – who translated the theme through the tools of visual language, the book can count on the contribution Paolo Mele, Claudio Zecchi, Radical Intention, Massimo Carozzi, Domenico Licchelli, Luca Coclite, Heba Amin e Francesca Girelli, Alessandro Carboni Carlos Casas and Alessandra Pioselli. This diversification brings a dual function: on the one hand narrate the theme of the Extreme Lands from different perspectives, on the other indicate the multi-disciplinary methodology with which Ramdom has always approached the work creating relations capable of multiplying the plans of access and deepening.

A project by Ramdom

Book published by Viaindustriae, Foligno, 2019, pag. 144, 15 €

Edited by Paolo Mele, Annapaola Presta, Claudio Zecchi

Texts by: Paolo Mele, Claudio Zecchi, Radical Intention, Massimo Carozzi, Domenico Licchelli, Luca Coclite, Heba Amin e Francesca Girelli, Alessandro Carboni, Carlos Casas, Alessandra Pioselli, Elena Mazzi e Rosario Sorbello, Romina De Novellis, Lia Cecchin, Riccardo Giacconi e Carolina Valencia Caicedo

La pubblicazione si è resa possibile grazie al supporto del bando / The publication has been possible thanks to the support by SIAE | Sillumina Copia privata per i giovani, per la cultura e MiBAC e Regione Puglia Dipartimento turismo, economia della cultura e valorizzazione del territorio. Sezione economia della cultura.

Phase three. Finalization.

The third phase of work helped us to draw conclusions. On the one hand the reflection on what we did and its theoretical understanding; on the other hand, the presentation of the research in different forms almost assumable to the concept of opera.

The extreme lands, in the specific case of Il Capo di Leuca, are as Valentino says – the fisherman interviewed by Riccardo and Carolina in the preparation of their radio documentary – the last and the first point. Depending on where you look at.

The extreme lands are a complex subject and very much close to a land of passage, in the specific case at the center of the Mediterranean, whose borders are much broader and less definable than they appear at a first sight. This openness blurs their definition and, in their marginal position, they constantly question the conventional wisdom. They are also a place of resistance, a place of radical possibilities and an extraordinary experimental laboratory in which the language is constantly renegotiated in a function aimed at creating a new horizon. The extreme lands force us to constantly reposition ourselves in relationship to the place we perform establishing so a dialectic tension with the territory and those who live it generating a plurality of perspectives of signification.

Carlos Casas, Director, and visual artist talks in fact about the extreme landscapes “as places where it is still possible to experience visions that allow us to measure our limits and increase our consciousness. Places capable of notice our ignorance by helping us to broaden our capacity of understanding the world”.

If we thus assume the extreme lands as a tool per se, it is clear then that we are in the domain of risk, a domain in which it is possible to operate by fractures and discontinuity.

As already mentioned, on a strictly methodological level, the attempt was, in fact, to free the research from the moment of the production, not asking the artists for the realization of a final work – if not the contribution for the realization of a book – formally resolved. This space of freedom has paradoxically generated a sort of stumbling and, what should have only been the presentation of the research in its discursive statute, has turned into the presentation of objects (if not really artworks) potentially generative of further possibilities.

Riccardo Giacconi and Carolina Valencia Caicedo have in fact acknowledged in the Capo di Leuca the possibility to continue their long-term research on sound landscapes and oral testimonies of specific communities realizing the first part of a radio documentary titled Scarcagnuli. The radio documentary has been presented both in the form of “cinema without images”, and as a sort of “radio” event daily broadcasted for about thirty minutes at the same time at the Bar 2000.

With OLGA (Outdoor Lab for Gathering the Absence), Lia has worked on the subject of memory by stressing what one has forgotten rather than about the information that has been resisted at the action of the time. Gagliano del Capo is, in fact, a village with a strong migratory past where the previous generations moving elsewhere to seek for luck and move away from a present that indicates it as a tourist destination and place of passage. Starting from this transient identity, Lia has worked on the concepts of absence, loss and therefore on the reconstruction of memories.

Both works have eventually succeeded in defining a field of relation which has emerged as a means and not as an end by making the work, as freed from an unfinalized creative activity, to emphasize the problematic dimension of the processes in their complexity.

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Phase two. Anthropic and environmental landscape.

Free the research from the moment of the production; Insisting on a radically slow time; Tracing stories and detecting possible formats – not formalized works in the strict sense of term – are just some of the conditions that have pushed the research in a trajectory that aims to shape and deepen the boundaries of a human landscape, where, so far, the core of the investigation was mainly focused on the landscape and its geographical circumstances.

In this sense, it is perhaps better to think at the word landscape from a wider perspective and talk rather of “spaces” in the plural. «[…] The territorial evidence are different and influence the artistic choices. The word “spaces”, deliberately in quotation marks, implying the environment, the landscape or the territory. These are terms that would originally have different connotations: it does not change the object of analysis, but the way of observing it, which determines the conceptual category expressed through the choice of terminology. […]» (A. Pioselli, L’arte nello spazio urbano, premessa).

Thelandscape is thus the place of both the individual and collective perception inthe “making” of a place as a “landscape” (A. Pioselli) and in this second phaseof the work the artists have been pulled towards a much wider reading throughthose tools, or viewing places, offered by professionals in different disciplines.

Startingfrom the conflictual definition of territory and community investigated withpsychologist Michele Romanelli, the gaze layed then, through an experimentaland dysfunctional methodology, on the possibility to actually identify apossible relationship between the real extreme land and the extreme dreamlikeland (Radical Intention). Here the collective work in its processualimplication, imposed in the first place the need to focus on a language thathas been constantly and radically re-negotiated as a common glossary. A totallyre-invented glossary in order to determine the place where one is located andunderstand, if and how the individual and collective emotional level can bemutually influenced in a shared condition. The result partially achieved hasbeen a map, an in-progress landscape where one, in the words of Clavino –switching the word city with the word space – «should never confuse the citywith the discourse that describes it».

The map tends indeed torelate two planes tracing the threshold of a limbo in which the emotionalaspect is constantly present. A fragile and ephemeral aspect in which the sounddimension is fully present, since the listening, and finally explored with artist Massimo Carozzi (Zimmerfrei). A dimension that contributes to furtherenlarge the plan of the survey as a tool capable of thinking the”spaces” – in both their anthropic and environmental nature – withoutimages and broaden thus by paradox, their emotional power. The sound becomeshence a tool through which approaching people (how?), collecting testimoniesand creating a common narrative that, by not giving a precise geographicalindication, moves from a particular towards a universal plan.