The Passing of the Keepers of Salento: a memorial to obsolescence

From the beginning, the ultimate act of the Moving Landscape project has been to produce a collective book, to be seen as a dramaturgy that comprises visions and perceptions that emerged during the artistic residencies and the collective writing workshops. The Planar collective, Anna Vasta and Antonio Ottomanelli, with Alessia Bernardini, have led the group towards the definition of the narrative and editorial structure, and have ultimately been asked to collaborate through this last phase. This has been a process of discussion and experimentation, during which works realized by the four artists in residence (Enoch Chen, Anne-Marie Creamer, TJ Hospodar, Santiago Morilla), writings by narrators, and pictures by Yacine Benseddik have been totally deconstructed and put together again into a mutual dialogue to restitute a complex, somehow fading, imaginary of those crossed lands and artistic approaches.

Creamer's works for the Moving Landscape project include: 'The Passing of the Keepers of Salento', an 11 minute video, with related works including a text-based version of the video, and 'Dear Anne-Marie' a scripted scenario and performative intervention.

About the 'Moving Landscape' project, excerpted from the book:

MOVING LANDSCAPE

With a fresh and sharp eye, a group of writers, artists and narrators, plumbed the human and geographic landscape, and conversed with it by moving on the Southeast Railway trains, and passing through small stations and keeper's houses, from the city of Lecce to the furthest extremities of the territory of Salento.

A disillusioned look, that finally allows to escape stereotypes of a sometimes distorted identity, and give back new interpretations and connections to the memories of those landscapes. Thus Art is invested with the role, which is at the same time delicate and political, of unveiling and re-imagining new perspectives and new relationships with the land we belong.

Our question was "What can we actually see today? what is left? and most of all, how can this still be connected to the present world?” If on the one hand we rigorously defined our scope - the train, the railway area, we also gave ourselves the chance of acting within a broader framework, as observers in transition, whose look could placidly glide on the (re)opened landscape.

What we saw is a land that proudly holds on to its troubled history, which is made of dirt and sacrifices, struggles and small revolutions, pain and beauty. We tried, as witnesses of this history, to look at its flaws and strengths.

Salento is an extreme land covered in olive trees, centuries-old witnesses of its history. As people, trees are the creative forces of this land, although being too often violated by compromises that subjugated, polluted and neglected it. Nowadays, new wounds have been inflicted upon this land: TAP, the annoying Xylella, unregulated urbanization, old and new migrations, the consuming exploitation of the resources.

Those scars are painful, but also honorable.

Heroes here have callus-covered hands, wrinkles on their sunburnt face, they are the workers, students, farmers and harvesters, those who live in harmony with the earth and the sea. This is the Landscape as we perceive it, a symbolic land that establishes connections between the man and his world, and in which art and community become opportunities for re-considering and re-interpreting our time, its humanity and society, and for discovering new perspectives and spaces that can be finally experienced in new ways.

Moving Landscape is a participated workshop centered on gaining new perspectives on the territory, a dialogue around the landscape that can emerge between different artistic and narrative languages.

The artworks and the collective writing gave voice to the complexity of our time, speaking of an ongoing transformation process. The project, that consisted of three different phases, initially involved a group of writers coordinated by Luca Di Meo (Wu Ming 3); four international artists on a month-long residency in Lecce; and finally the Planar Collective with Alessia Bernardini to lead to the translation of the workshop into the final textual and visual form. The interventions act on the present time in a temporary and transitory dimension, by intertwining the activity of listening to the Keepers’ memories and those of the abandoned buildings with the observation of the contemporary landscape.Through a choral process for the generation of new meanings, we tried to give back this land its identity, which is unavoidably variable and multi-faceted.

LIBRO/THE BOOK:

pp. 1-136 + Copertina/Cover + Inserti/Inserts + Libro Dei Raconti/Novelbook.

Since the very beginning, the ultimate act of the Moving Landscape project has been conceived as a collective book, to be seen as a dramaturgy that comprises visions and perceptions emerged during the artistic residencies and the collective writing workshops. Planar, Anna Vasta and Antonio Ottomanelli, with Alessia Bernardini, have led the group towards the definition of the narrative and editorial structure, and have ultimately been asked to collaborate through this last phase. This has been a process of discussion and experimentation, during which works realized by the four artists in residence, writings by narrators, pictures by Yacine Benseddik have been totally deconstructed and put again into a mutual dialogue to restitute a complex, somehow fading, imaginary of those crossed lands and artistic approaches.

Planar collective – based in Bari, works for the promotion and critics of contemporary photography and visual arts. Originally from Milan, Alessia Bernardini is a photographer. In the last years, she has been successfully experimenting the production of self-published editions.

L’ARCHIVIO
Fotografia quarta di copertina Fabio Vergari; pp.15, 60-61, 85

The Museo Ferroviario di Lecce has supported the research conducted by the Moving Landscape artists and writers by hosting site-specific works and lending materials and equipment of its property. Since 1999, AISAF ONLUS and Associazione Dopolavoro Ferroviaro di Lecce, together with the FS Office for Museum Activities and Railways Historical Culture have promoted the creation of a railways museum facility as an instrument for the improvement of both the city area, the province and the region in general.

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