A former fisherman's shed becomes a micro art gallery in the Marche region

In the 1980s, it was a fishermen’s shed, located a few metres away from what is now the Marina of Porto San Giorgio, a seaside village in the Marche region near Fermo. L’Approdo is a small building that stands out for its 1950s fixtures and blue-painted sign. The locals called it sgabbiotto (a regional term for shed) for a long time, until it became a mussel shop, closed and abandoned a few years later. Today, thanks to a unique redevelopment and territorial promotion project in the Marche region, L’Approdo is a cultural centre dedicated to contemporary art, visible from the outside 24 hours a day.

The architecture, renovated by the administration, hosts a four-week artistic residency project, with a final exhibition. The artist, chosen among young emerging Italians, is asked to research the heritage of the maritime culture through inclusive practices capable of restoring narratives that are often forgotten. The guest can directly design site-specific works in the little house, where a chair and a desk are set up. The protagonist of the project is Collettivo Karussell, an association dedicated to contemporary art and that operates on the territory, made up of Matilde Galletti, Lidia Martorana and Marica Riccioni.

In spring, the first invitee is Alice Visentin (Turin, 1993), whose research focuses on small communities. In restoring the spirit of the place, through listening sessions of archive materials and meetings with fishermen and researchers, Visentin has given form to the local intangible heritage by creating a dreamlike wall drawing that occupies all the walls, composed of poetic images and ancient sayings, and is today a permanent work with which the artists protagonists of the next residencies will confront in the future, integrating it in their projects. . The exhibition “Planète”, curated by Galletti, an art historian and curator, owes its title to the French magazine of the same name from the 1970s, which the painter discovered at the same time as the residency. On one of the interior walls by Visentin, next to a blue-painted hand, we read: “distortion of space and time”. Outside, the brightly lit neon sign “L’Approdo” appears, in dialogue with the hand-painted original, as if to indicate a cyclical relationship between contemporaneity and tradition. An exercise in tenacity.