ARTEPOLLINO Another South
An Emblematic Project – The Role of Art
By Mario Pisani

“Art’s task is not to represent what is visible, but to find what is invisible in the visible” - Joan Mirò

The Pollino National Park, one of the biggest in Europe, stands like a giant fortress between Calabria and Lucania, on the Lucanian side. After meticulously and enthusiastically exploring a number of sites not far from the Sinnica highway, world-famous artists Anis Kapoor, Giuseppe Penone and Carsten Höller have recently built several poetic and captivating works in this truly unique and mesmerizing environment. Their works convey a strange and magnificent heartfelt yearning or craving, a full-blown ecstasy - an open invitation to reflect on the role of art in today’s world. It is possibly a cocktail, a mixture of surprise, wonder and amazement that leads us to consider and facilitate a new relationship between art and the landscape, a relationship capable of capturing the indescribable.

Kapoor’s work has been exhibited in the most important museums in the world. He has given us a truly intense image of the work he created a few years ago at the Tate in London. I’m talking about Marsys, a sort of huge red PVC trumpet, one hundred and fifty metres long and 35 metres high, stretched taut over three gigantic steel hoops. The work filled the whole cathedral-size turbine entrance hall of the gallery and, apart from the surprise, inspired a sort of reverential awe which the artist completely ignored, interested as he was in his own experiments which he describes as “a descent into limbo (…)” a journey that leads under ground. In Italy, Kapoor has designed one of the subway stations in Naples.

In the Pollino Park in front of the spa in Latronico, he has invented an installation he calls Cinema di Terra (Earth Cinema).
 It is a huge, deep furrow in the surface of the earth: 45m long, 3m wide and 7m deep. Visitors walk along it until they reache a small horizontal square, a sort of long, narrow cavea from where they look at the unusual spectacle of the bowels of the earth. A solitary and moving journey, a sort of personal descent into hell revealing the ground/earth in which you feel you want to bury your hands - the earth to which we will all return with our unanswered questions, the earth where the healthy waters of a spa bubble nearby.
Penone’s work is a few kilometres away, along the Val Sarmento riverbed in Noepoli, not far from the group of towns where people still talk Albanese like St. Paul and St. Constantine. A land scarcely populated but covered in bushes of broom, surrounded by a captivating landscape, dotted with small villages rich in history, culture, traditions, rites and natural beauty.

I remember an incredible exhibition by this artist in Nîmes, in the Mediateque hall designed by Norman Foster in front of the Maison Carrée, an Imperial style temple, symbol of the Roman city. A protagonist of the Poor Art movement, Penone has coherently developed the ideas of an artistic experience using poor, natural, anti-artistic materials to emphasise their energy and analyse natural processes. In some of his more recent works he matches the energies and materials of art with those of nature, for instance, big trees - some real, some in bronze - in the castle/museum in Rivoli. Or the natural stones and their sculpted twins in the work Essere fiume (1981). In 2004, the Centre Pompidou in Paris honoured him with a retrospective.

Here he has built a Vegetal Theatre which he describes as “a place that is part of the landscape of the region, created with vegetal elements that regulate space and define each part”. A circle with a 120m diameter created using trees, bushes and stones; a way to assert the possible harmony between the work of man and the spontaneous work of nature. A natural stage from which to admire the powerful force of the ravines, the tops of nearby mountains like the Dolcedorme and the lush vegetation, setting it against the hardness of the riverbed, burnt and dry. Art is full of contrasts, forces that clash and are then reconciled, forces that convey a desire to explore the world to understand why we are here.

Carsten Höller, a German artist working in Stockholm, loves to confuse the spectator with an ironic game in which he inserts elements of doubt and uncertainty, an artist whose work goes in the opposite direction to Kapoor’s. He leads us gently up to heaven.
A carousel similar to those in fun fairs, placed at the top of a hill near San Severino Lucano: its 12 spokes carry 24 people on an enchanted journey, suspended in a landscape that speaks to the soul, whispering unheard melodies. It is a leisurely journey during which one can embrace the infinity between heaven and earth; in the words of the author, it creates “elation and happiness” in those who experience it, stunned by the awe-inspiring visions that run from the mountains to the sea.

One of the most interesting artists of the nineties, Höller contributed to bringing art closer to reality, involving the public with strategies that used mechanisms intended to provoke unusual reactions. His poetics consist in asking questions that undermine the certainties of our contemporary lifestyle. In late 2008 he created a temporary installation (six months) in London called The Double Club, a restaurant, bar and dance hall. He wanted to bring together the Congolese community and western society. The restaurant served a double menu of typical recipes from North Europe and the Congo.

Artepollino was sponsored by the Regione Basilicata and the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, the Italian Ministry for Cultural Assets and Activities, the Fondazione La Biennale in Venice. Other sponsors include Mario Cristiani, director of the Associazione Arte Continua Vicente Todolì, director of the Modern di London, Laura Barreca, delegate of the Ministry for Cultural Assets and Activities; Catterina Seia, representative of UniCredit & Art; Emanuele Montibeller, the artistic director of ArteSella; Giampiero Perri, director of the Agenzia di Promozione Territoriale Basilicata; Giuseppe Cosenza, Nicola Ferri, Davide Rossi, Vincenzo Vitale, all with expert knowledge of the Pollino and members of the Associazione Arte Pollino. All these institutions and individuals are convinced that this is an excellent way to launch and enhance a territory well worth knowing and appreciating.