Calori & Maillard
Diving Into Poetry
05.22.2021 – 08.22.2021
Calori & Maillard
Diving Into Poetry
05.22.2021 – 08.22.2021
The ancient city of Roca was one of the most important trading centres of the Mediterranean sea in the Bronze age, located at the crossroads of the commercial routes that connected the Aegean and the Adriatic sea. It was a place of intense exchanges, yet at the peak of its expansion the city became the target of several raids by pirates, and even their hideout. Hence, in the 14th century it was razed to the ground. This is the story of ancient civilisations, of full-fledged prehistorical centres that influenced the balances of Mediterranean exchanges and that, as the result of troubled or traumatic events, inverted the direction of their evolution and ended up falling into oblivion. The morphology of these places, mostly marked by the presence of cliffs of sedimentary rock, seems to reflect the unfortunate history of the city. The cliff is indeed particularly friable as it is contains layers of undersea fossil fragments and limestone particles with the same size as sand grains. It is threatened both by the looming erosion of the coasts, and by the large presence of tourists that seasonally occupy this area.
Seen from above, the “Grotta della Poesia” (Poetry Grotto) looks like a big eye that appears in the middle of the archaeological area. The grotto, marked by countless epigraphs that mark the human presence in the landscape from prehistorical to present times, is the result of the collapse of the vault. This fall formed a natural basin which embodies the time layers that we are analysing: the time of geological sedimentation and the historical-anthropological time. A few metres away, skilled divers perform jumps into the air, which is in itself a contemporary ritual. To jump from, and climb again the cliff is a never-ending cycle that takes place among the peculiar community of the angels of Roca, the custodians and regulars of this fragile cliff imbued with history.
Fixing in photographs some specific instants of this popular phenomenon, diving into poetry undoes the variables that are embodied in the double movement that is focalised: on the one hand, the geo-morphological movement of the rocks emerging from the sea, and the anthropological movement of the bodies that drive themselves towards water. diving into poetry investigates, by subtracting, the unexplored space that emerges from the linkages between rock layers and muscle tension, between movement and seeming stasis. The project reflects a memory that is deeply rooted in the forms and in the composition of matter. In this a-temporal condition, the message is transferred on the mythological level and it hints at the passage towards a new dimension. It is not by coincidence that the suspended body in diving brings us back to the iconography of the diver in Paestum (fourth century BC), an image that evokes another funerary painting, an Etruscan image from the last decades of the same century. Both images, just like in the series of photographs by Calori & Maillard, visually record the moment when the extreme limit of reality is overcome, and when falling and raising become a metaphor of human events and of the cycle of life.
The exhibition is part of the event series Scuola popolare, performance di parola tra gesto e architettura (People’s school, performances of words between gesture and architecture), promoted by Regione Puglia in the framework of the 2020 extraordinary programme for culture and performances.