In Puglia a mini arts residency in a social-housing courtyard

“Giardino project“ was born on the ground floor of a condominium apartment of the ‘80s, in a formersocial housing complex in Trepuzzi, a small town in Puglia, 12 km from Lecce. The residential garden for private use, owned by curator Giuseppe Amedeo Arnesano, becomes “a domestic place of comparison and research related to artistic and curatorial practices”, as he explains in the press release, “cyclically rethought as a collective gardening activity for visual arts”. When we ask Arnesano what the neighborhood’s response was, he replies “Wonderful. My neighbours are used to these initiatives and I am now an active part of them: we help each other”.

If art is life, the elective places in which to enjoy it should be those that are most familiar to us: once they used to be churches and palaces, today city apartments, supermarkets or the courtyards of social housing. Even the good old white cube is to be added to the list, but more for its anesthetizing power of non-place, a drug we are all a bit addicted to and difficult to get rid of. Giuseppe Amedeo Arnesano takes us back to a more human dimension thanks to his “giardino project” (garden project): a series of mini residencies that last three days, for artists and curators, who are asked to dialogue with the space and with the slow rhythms of everyday life. Each residency ends with an evening event open to the public, with 25 places available, in which you can participate by sending an email.

The zero edition, entitled “Sui rami di quel microcosmo risuonano motivi aerei” (On the branches of that microcosm resound aerial motifs) is inspired by the description of the Persian gardens inside the Arabian Nights; the garden intended as a mystical place full of symbolic, spiritual and cultural meanings. The first guest was the young artist Stefano Giuri, creator of Toast Project at Manifattura Tabacchi, Florence, with the performance A tu per tu con Tutankhamon, while on Sunday 9 August it will be the turn of Caterina Molteni, assistant curator at MAMbo in Bologna with an evening event entitled “Pensiero che profuma di terra” (A thought that smells like earth) .