Vulci Mon Amour: at Vulci, Etruscan archaeology dialogues with contemporary art

On view from July 7 to September 15, 2018, at the Vulci Nature and Archaeological Park (in Montalto di Castro, province of Viterbo) is the exhibition Vulci Mon Amour. Frammenti di Paesaggio - Frammenti di Sottosuolo (Fragments of Landscape - Fragments of the Underground): it is an unprecedented itinerary conceived by Mara van Wees, curated by Gianna Besson and Francesca Perti, which displays in the Etruscan archaeological park the works of Lucilla Catania, Tommaso Cascella,Francesco Castellani, Andrea Fogli, Antonio Grieco, Massimo Luccioli, Jasmine Pignatelli, Paolo Torella, Mara van Wees and B. Zarro. This is not the first time that contemporary art has come to Vulci: in fact, the project kicked off in 2016 with the Pietra Liquida exhibition inside the Cryptoporticus, then continued with The Vulci Code in 2017. The great public response highlighted how the Vulci site is particularly suitable for contemporary art exhibition events. So this year the underground exhibition in the cryptoporticus is joined by an outdoor route through spaces steeped in Etruscan, Roman and Christian memory.

The theme of Vulci Mon Amour is the fragment, understood as the memory of a lost unity and at the same time particle of a new unity, splinter and star of a real and imaginary constellation, and again fragment as the basic element on which past civilizations were reconstructed, but also instantaneous image, photogram that composes the story of today. The works unfold between an outdoor pathway immersed in the park (“Fragments of Landscape”) and the underground pathway of the cryptoporticus (“Fragments of Subsoil”), working on the dialogue between antiquity and the languages of contemporary sculpture. In Frammenti di Paesaggio, curated by Francesca Perti, the artists (Tommaso Cascella, Francesco Castellani, Massimo Luccioli, Jasmine Pignatelli, Paolo Torella, Mara van Wees, B. Zarro) create works by assembling, composing, constructing, deconstructing, and contaminating blocks of the typical tufa of the area. The sculptures/installations highlight an exhibition path of landscape fragments, accompanying the visitor from the west door to the entrance of the Cryptoporticus where the second part of the exhibition takes place.

“Vulci, like any ancient place,” reads Francesca Perti’s critical text, “takes us back to the period of childhood, to mystery, to aporia, when two statements in opposition coexist. [...] I look at Vulci and think that the only contemporary Goethe is the artist, in search of the experience of beauty, in a desperate attempt to lose himself like a new Stendhal and to find himself in the search for form, to throw dice of beauty in this very short game that some insist on calling life. Paolo Torella, like a modern Lucomone is the priest, the seer who foresees the future: he performs the miracle of the meeting of past and present at a precise point: the shadow, the indelible imprint of Hiroshima, the shadow of bodies imprinted on the walls by the heat of the thermonuclear explosion. Tommaso Cascella, like the magician, works with light and shadow, juggling from the unconscious to the superconscious: ”Mars“ makes us hear echoes of the Etruscan god Maris, the deity who shows himself as a child, connected with death and resurrection. Castellani’s work is the materialization of all dreams, the soul without which the world is not the world, but a barren desert, the end of hope: his work is a road of yellow bricks covered with salvage sheets the color of gold, at the end of the road a pair of old shoes, worn out by the long journey. B. Zarro’s work is a Rolls Royce worn down by time, but retaining its old splendor, branded with a symbol that is now one logo among many, a symbol now replaced by the F of Facebook, an icon of a hyper-consumerism that reduces minds to mere waste to be disposed of. Jasmine Pignatelli’s work confronts us with our uncertainties, our deepest impulses, in a game of composition and decomposition, with lines as pure and precise as arrows: a hemp bird, light and solid at the same time. A disc of tuff, cast at 1170 degrees, transformed by the artist’s uncontrollable inner drive: Massimo Luccioli offers us his gift, gives us the face of the Knower, invites us to a revolution possible only in the nonverbal depths of being, in the darkness of an unknown land from which our humanity emerges. Mara van Wees’ work is an explosion of geometry, light and shadow chasing each other, the colors are a tactile, mellow experience that has to do with pleasure, with emotional life: the artist looks straight ahead, the architect of her own destiny; she composes and decomposes forms with the mastery of a seventeenth-century architect.”

In Frammenti di Sottosuolo, curated by Gianna Besson, the artists (Lucilla Catania, Antonio Grieco and Andrea Fogli) present sculptural installations that combine ceramic materials, bronze and marble with the concept of shattering and recomposition of time, memory and identity, in a symbiosis between the spirit of the place, its hidden, cryptic identity, the concept of archaeological find and the anxieties of the contemporary. “Fragment,” writes Gianna Besson, “is the brick that will become wall, the letter that will make up the alphabet, the word that will be language, the ingredient that will be food. But also destruction, what remains after the fracture, the dross, the residue, the infinitesimal particle of the gigantic explosion produced by a God of the All, dying. Fragment is the tile of a mosaic. Fragment means past, archaeology and also present, instant image of a film, flash of an instant, connection of a point with the global network. Fragment then is future, creative drive, testimony to immortality [...]. In the works of Frammenti di sottosuolo, the shattered reality that tends toward the absolute approaches the discovery of the ultimate meaning of things, the essence of what we see and experience. Catania weaves his Boxes and Shoes with Handles, as red as earth and as fire, solidified lava erupted from a volcano of everyday life made of burning and quiet memories. The dynamism suggested by his weaves dialogues with Antonio Grieco’s Vibraria, suspended hammers moved by the air that sway melodiously in the void of the cryptoportic’s natural cave, ready to shatter matter. Fogli’s golden clays, Natures and Veins, refer to a mysterious and organic whole, particles of the very small or the very large, in which one can unearth the outline of a bird’s beak or a cathedral, underwater incrustations or features of a fleshy face [...] The artists, the materials, the inspirations, together with the archaic history of the cryptoporticus, scrutinize memory to orient themselves to the becoming of tomorrow. The materials of these ancestral places, linked to history and nature, chosen by the artists, seem the most suitable to express that evocative yearning essential to artistic expression and at the same time to include and understand the universe of today. The invitation is to take a journey that starts from the tunnels of an ancient Roman cryptoporticus, buried in the Etruscan ruins of an archaeological park, and arrives in distant places, in the space of a constellation.”

The exhibition, presented by the Vulci Foundation with the Municipality of Montalto di Castro, and with the collaboration Soprintendenza Archeologica Belle Arti e Paesaggio for the Metropolitan Area of Rome the Province of Viterbo and Southern Etruria and the FAI Viterbo Delegation, can be visited during the opening hours of the Vulci Nature and Archaeological Park: daily from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. (from Sept. 1 from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.). Tickets: full price € 10.00, reduced € 5.00. Info at vulci.it.

Pictured: Francesco Castellani, Yellow brick road (to fleeing migrants).

Vulci Mon Amour: at Vulci, Etruscan archaeology dialogues with contemporary art

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