Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino
Il Mito – Unconventional Archive
06.29.2025 – 08.17.2025
Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino
Il Mito – Unconventional Archive
06.29.2025 – 08.17.2025
The Myth – Unconventional Archive
Melpignano, Palazzo Marchesale Castriota
June 29 – August 17, 2025
The exhibition “The Myth – Unconventional Archive” is part of the program for the 50’s anniversary celebration of Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino and it’s meant to explore the significance and impact of one of the most emblematic experiences in the field of the popular orality directly through the own voices of the protagonists. An elaborate selection of textual, photographic, audiovisual documents and archive materials, especially unpublished work, is accessible in the exhibition to render the complex and dynamic interactions between local and national dimensions by offering a critical reflection on the processes that transformed and still remodel the intangible heritage of traditional oral music.
The band Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino was founded in 1975 during a time of intense reevaluation of popular and subaltern cultures where singing as a social act becomes a political, expressive and identity-based instrument. At that time, retrieving a song, a rhythm or a minority language was a symbolic act of resistance to give back dignity and voice to people that have been excluded by the official narration.
From cultural struggles in the 70’s to research and experimentation in the 80’s until sound contamination in the 90’s and the expansion into the international scene today, the journey of Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino represents an indisputable experience of lively transformation of popular heritage. In time the band has been able to combine intergenerational communication with the renewal of languages and expressive approaches building up a collective narrative where memory turns into form, gesture and cultural vision through direct connection with institutions, intellectuals and internationally renowned artists.
The exhibition travels along time to bring back the complex cultural processes as ever-changing interconnected systems. A philological methodology behind the exposition helps to catch both the rhythmic breath of a territory with its historical and cultural settlings and the asynchrony between fast production and slow but necessary renegotiation of symbols, languages, and relationships in contemporary evolving contexts.
The subheading Unconventional Archive reflects the peculiar nature of this path: not only the consultation and retrieving of documents from archives but also deep research through participation, connections, listening and collection of individual tales, intimate memories, meeting filled with emotions, gestures, and past. This fragile, but at the same time, very powerful material shaped the story using tools that pointed out the importance of subjectivity in creating the narrative.
Therefore, this “unconventional” archive aims to be a device to light up the collective memory and to reveal experiences that are not formalized in official archives. The humanity met along this path allowed the transition from an individual narration to a plural dimension where the personal memory becomes a political and shared space. Hence, singular turns into plural: from “me” to “us”, from intimate memory to shared heritage.
Today, after 50 years, Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino has been confirmed as a living archive, a cultural entity that preserves the oral heritage but, at the same time, is able to renew it making it accessible and significant for the present. Like a palm tree deeply rooted in the soil but with leaves raised up, Canzoniere has its roots in the historical memory but looks toward the future translating the traditional discipline in an open, plural, and profoundly contemporary language.