Design | Tutor Crispino Lanza

Puglia, as well as well as the countries bordering the Mediterranean basin, is a territory that has always been populated by olive threes. For this reason, and for its peculiar aesthetic characteristics, due to its unpredictable trace, this plant has always provided and supplied the raw material for the realization of home objects, furnishings and accessories. Considering the morphology of the trunk, and its structural inhomogeneity, olive tree is not a wood essence easy to process and, above all, not suitable for applications where mechanical properties are particularly important. Therefore, a creative effort is required to imagine olive wood not always and not only as the sole material protagonist of a designed object, but also as an actor interacting with other materials (technological or natural), without forgetting interactions with other potentially synergetic components such as light, smell, colour, sound, food, other plants. The key themes that will be tackled by the protagonists of the workshop will be the 4 elements (water, air, earth and fire), all essential elements for life and protagonists of the stories that, from their birth to their explant, these olive trees could tell. The collections of objects will be divided into 3 macro-areas / purposes of use:

– Museum merchandising
– Furniture and accessories for accommodation facilities
– Kitchen accessories

Performance | Tutor Salvatore Tramacere

Koreja Theater, Center of production and theatrical experimentation, has been active for over 30 years, has produced more than 40 shows, circulated among 45 countries of the world, won national and international awards. Cultural stratification, a new identity and marginality are the principles that define Koreja. Salvatore Tramacere has studied with important international theatre personalities such as Eugenio Barba, Iben Rasmussen, Pina Baush. Koreja’s theatrical pedagogy is based on those areas of intervention where theories and practices are immediately mixed. The proposed training path is a shared work of growth and deepening of the different artistic languages, to give instruments of interpretation of the reality through the theatre. Working on theatrical performance means elaborating a dialogue to be returned in artistic form with the places hit by Xylella, by amplifying and reworking the message. The work phases foresee, first of all, a personal research process, and then a group one, taking advantage of the different nationalities and artistic specificities of the participants, which will be themselves the authors of the performance.

Public art/land art | Tutor Mauro Lazzari, Laura Basco

The current landscape of Salento, affected by the rapid drying of its symbolic plant, the olive tree, tells – paraphrasing Eugenio Turri – much more than we might want to know about our time. It is a pandemic that no longer concerns only the peasant population of a portion of the regional territory, but of a wider and more complex phenomenon, which has revealed the extreme fragility of the agricultural heritage, which has become radicalized towards the monoculture of the olive tree only since the Sixties. It is precisely starting from this fragility, through this residency program, that we can ask ourselves what cultural processes and inputs public art can put in place to experiment strategies of cohabitation with the changes taking place in the landscape. The artists will tackle the relationships between the needs and expectations of a rural territory that goes through a strong environmental crisis, to propose their own reflections, imagining small or large utopias and triggering a pedagogical potential to change paradigm and create new landscapes, more resilient, with attention to biodiversity and sustainability.

Storytelling | Tutor Luigi D’Elia

“Ancient wisdom taught that the Mediterranean goes far as the olive tree grows” (Predag ​​Matvejevic). We have the word, the story, our bodies to listen to a land that is changing its skin and is doing it in a daze of words, laws, information, wind and cicadas. What happens to the shape of the Mediterranean, if the olive tree line changes? What happens to Puglia if the olive trees no longer grow? What happens to its horizons, what happens in the eyes of those who live there and those who cross it? What voice has all this? Which words? What is its sound? What is the “story” of all this? Also: what, of all this, claims with blood force of earth to be told? I always wonder what will remain. In this residence, instead, I wonder what “lives”! The residence is addressed to female or male narration voices (storytellers, actors, authors), to give voice to the circulatory system that travels seamlessly between the living beings of Puglia and their olive trees.

Video/photography | Tutor Michela Cerini

Identity and narration of places, of those places of the Puglia Region that transform themselves, adapt, struggle, succumb and get up, like and admire themselves even in change. An identity that comes from its geographical context and insinuates itself into the deepest roots of a culture that belongs to a complex and proud people, that made its history of its own land. A mission, an experiment, a challenge to give back to everyone what this land wants to tell us. A land that wants to be heard and told. Exploring and telling through the images the suggestion of a place, of its past and future history, of the intrinsic need to be experienced and revealed in what it was, what it is and what it could be, through visions and sounds that characterize it, through the words of those who lived it for years, and loved it. Through the hands of those who owns it every day. The eyes and the heart of this land have more interlocutors: men, plants, animals, the sirocco and the tramontana, the torrid heat and the red earth, the blinding green and the agony of change. The intent is to put Art at the service of this urgency, in particular video and photography, with their language and fullness, able to document, transform and give back a demand for story, memory and challenge.

Visual art (picture/sculpture) | Tutor Sarah Ciracì

The memory of the people who visit Puglia, it is mainly impressed by its characteristic landscape. Rich and varied, prehistoric and atavistic, it is marked equally significantly by human activities. Vineyards covered with plastic tarps, huge industries such as Ilva (in Taranto area) or Eni (in Brindisi area) testify a difficult balance between the needs of nature and man. A link of dependence, between man and nature, which has become an emergency with the spread of Xylella, in which man is called to protect the most sacred and ancient presence in the area: the centuries-old olive trees. In this context, art can be a valid tool to strengthen the bond of mankind’s dependence, to renew it, to bring back the idea that nature is a source of nourishment for man’s spiritual and emotional aspects. The fairy-tale tradition of the speaking tree is rich and meaningful of how man has always attributed to the tree a soul, and how it has always been lived as a source of profound wisdom, endowed with magical properties. From Pochaontas, to the Wizard of Oz, to the movie Avatar, the tree is the link between man and nature. The project aims to symbolically transform a secular olive tree in a sacred monument. Around it, the conditions for the public to contemplate it will be created, through weather-resistant sculptures with the function of welcoming the “pilgrim”. It will be possible to sit around it, contemplate it, observe every fold, and hear a story from each of them. Each artist, inspired by the tree and the stories from the community of people linked to the territory, will create his contribution to arrange the sacred monument, using every media related to the visual arts (sculptures, painting, photography, video…). In case of video or photographic contributions, links or QR Codes will be indicated inside the monument and displayed on smartphones.