A tour through Italy to meet organic farmers, bringing on their soils a phrase “What’s alive needs what’s alive” to identify small realities active in maintaining countrysides, biodiversity, land vitality and food sovereignty, as Agricolarte was. The latter was an agricultural cooperative and aesthetic operation, conceived by Luigi Pezzato, together with Maranola’s residents and shepherds of the Aurunci Mountains, in the years between 1980 and 1992.
From here starts Emanuela Ascari’s synergistic research, which has taken her in the same places were Pezzato was active, looking for forgotten remembrances, sources and fruits, those offered to visitors of Seminaria. Here a new and enriched storytelling is grafted onto the old one, in a garden of Maranola claiming the “need” of life and in a cellar where the artist’s tale becomes as clear as a glass of water, taken by the artist herself from the ancient Acquaviva spring and offered to the visitors.
Resonances is a sound-sensitive installation: you cannot see it, you cannot touch it, but it can be listened, in silence. The artist’s voice sprawls among the trees in a garden, reading the list of the names of the brightest and most popular stars of the universe, in alphabetical order. Ancient names, most of them in Arabic, but also in Latin, Greek, and Chinese, tell the story of shared knowledge that crosses periods and territories under a common sky. “Naming”, that is giving names to things and spelling them aloud, is a learning process, which in this case allows contemporary man to re-discover a universe it has given up exploring.
