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Sense – Authentic Sila Festival, the cultural project conceived and promoted by MABOS – Art Museum of the Bosco della Sila, a permanent laboratory of creativity and participation, immersed in the woods of the Sila Piccola of Catanzaro, returns for its ninth edition.
Here, over the years, Sense has become an awaited, recognized and participated event, capable of uniting art, culture, territory and social innovation. This year something new is added: the contemporary art residency, from 6 to 12 July, will develop along the course of the Melito river, in the symbolic area dedicated to Gioacchino da Fiore.
The title of the edition, “The Being and the Omen”, defines a poetic and conceptual trajectory that crosses the landscape: the river becomes a narrative axis, a living line that connects space, time and language.
The central element of the project is a constraint that also becomes a method: the works seek a continuous dialogue with each other, in the area of Gioacchino da Fiore, within the Mabos. One questions the present, the other opens up to the omen. Between the two, the visitor is called upon to become the body of passage and interpretation.
The protagonists will be Saverio Todaro, an artist born in Bern but trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, and then continued, since the 1990s, his research which investigates communication systems, biology, global networks and the dynamics of the immaterial. As part of Sense, he will present Oraclea work that starts from raw material and assembles it into an interactive element that stands as a threshold between the path of the poetic walk and the river.
It is a contemporary “oracle”, built with what normally remains hidden under the plaster. The surface, finished in gold, does not recall power but the transformation of matter: a light that makes what is marginal visible. Interaction is essential: the presence of the audience activates vibrations and physical responses of the work. Todaro thus translates Gioacchino da Fiore’s “Trinity of Times” into physical experience: the human being is in the middle, between what he builds and what is revealed to him.
The sculptor Mauro Mezzina, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bari, where he now teaches Sculpture Techniques and Technology, will instead create, along the banks of the Melito, a marble carpet, spread on the ground as a crossing and reading device. His work is structured as a tangle of natural signs, comparable to an ancient textile weave, but destined for the slow time of water, moss and human passage. Every grain of the marble becomes a sensitive surface, a domestic landscape. Enjoyment requires a physical gesture: you have to bend down, slow down, “find yourself” in the very act of looking and connect with the ground and the flow of the river.
The literary curation is entrusted to the writer and archaeologist Eliana Iorfida, who goes through the works not as a description but as a narrative graft, transforming the project into an experience of words and vision. His literary vision crosses “L’Essere e il Presagio” as the Melito crosses the Sila: hidden, carrying sediments. Between Todaro and Mezzina, Iorfida inserts the time of the story. His writing makes explicit what the works suggest: being is not given, it is an omen and announces itself only to those who agree to stop on the threshold.
The thought of Gioacchino da Fiore, who interpreted history as progressive revelation, is thus reread through the body and the landscape. The work of artists is not virtuosity, it is necessity. No “Oracle” works without the reflection of the Carpet. No carpet has its full function without the golden threshold that precedes it.
“For us, this residence represents an act of trust towards the territory and towards those who, like Todaro and Mezzina, accept the challenge of responding with art to the stimuli of a place that already has an ancient voice. The Mabos thus continues its journey: making the forest an open house, where the human being is not a spectator, but, in line with the Gioachimite teachings, represents the third element that completes the omen” explains the founder of the Mabos, Mario Talarico, recalling that art it is a necessary daily exercise for the body and soul.