Art Residency II Puglia, Italy
BAROQUE BLUE Ionian SeArt Residency 202
NATURE AND SHAMANIC COSMOLOGY
The Lower World, The Middle World and the Upper World
Art Curator Dores Sacquegna
Primo Piano Special Project offers a residency and retreat program for artists in southern Italy (Puglia Region). Baroque Blue Ionian SeArt Residency is a multidisciplinary project created with the aim of providing a wonderful space for musicians, scholars, writers, painters and performers looking for a quiet place to work undisturbed on their art. The scenery and beauty of the region and the Porto Selvaggio Regional Reserve Park, as well as the history and comfort of the house/villa, offer an ideal environment to focus on creative work.
An immersive art residency that aims to provide its residents with a holistic experience, allowing them to completely disconnect from their usual point of reference and immerse themselves in the Southern lifestyle, the essence of which is beauty, simplicity, quality and tranquility. Salento with Lecce as its capital is a special part of Puglia, so well preserved that it seems like you have traveled back in time. The village of Santa Caterina itself dates back to the Neolithic period. The town was built on high ground, surrounded by olive and pine trees which make it an ideal environment for meditative excursions and exploration.
THEME – Baroque Blue 2024 with the residency project “Nature and Shamanic Cosmology”, proposes a journey between anthropology, archaeology, psychology and contemporary art to discover the fascinating world of shamans, through a multidisciplinary path that dialogues with elements of Apulian shamanism ( eerie anthropic masks, Neo- and Paleolithic graffiti, atavistic rituals related to the Taranta myth, drums, ritual costumes and trousseaus, zoomorphic god-figures of the popular bestiarium) with immersive installations in nature and artworks produced from the imputs received.
But what really is shamanism? Who are shamans and what do they do? Can we consider these figures the most ancient mediators between humanity and nature? The basic point of the project is the stylized human figure of a “dancing shaman” woman in the graffiti of Porto Badisco Grotto on the Adriatic side and considered as the first artistic and spiritual testimony of Salento, elected as an undisputed symbol of the ancient history of this part of Italy, but also other elements such as the anthropic masks found on monuments, facades of palaces and depictions of Apulian popular Iconography.
Shamanic practice, combined with archaeology and contemporary art, moves from a spiritual or therapeutic dimension of nature to an artistic practice that crosses over, the environmental issue, a theme of absolute topicality: in fact, starting from the work-manifesto Defense of Nature by Joseph Beuys, a shamanic artist par excellence, the residency, suggests a respectful and conscious coexistence in which human beings do not live outside or in antithesis to the animal, natural or spiritual worlds but are part of them.
Divided into three sessions or worlds ( Lower World, Middle World, Upper World) , the residency offers artists, the opportunity to connect the Téchne, the spirit and the idea between shamanism and technology, proposing their art as a life experience, as an immersive sensory exploration through nature, applied to cognitive science.
The intent is to weave opportunities and horizons for dialogue among artists of different generations and backgrounds, to experiment with a strategy of transversality, to rethink the objects produced as impermanent objects, as transient and evocative beings, through a conceptual approach that starts from the artist-shaman placed in a landscape context, and brings it back to the dimension of the sacred of our ancestors, to the theme of shamanism. During the residency, there will be panel discussions, scientific and ethnoanthropological video documentaries, as well as meetings with anthropologists, archaeologists, scholars, to trace the stages that led to the birth of shamanism in the culture of Southern Italy. Among heterogeneous styles and different media (painting, sculpture, video, photography, installation, poetry and more), the project investigates the spiritual and therapeutic dimension of contemporary practices. Artists are accompanied by her GUIDE-CURATOR on site. Curator role is to help artists, encourage and stimulate new productions.
DATES OF RESIDENCY NATURE AND SHAMANIC COSMOLOGY
The Lower World (from 29 June to 11 July 2024);
The Middle World ( from 20 to 31 July);
The Upper World ( from 24 August to 05 September).