ITINERANT MURAL & VIDEO PROJECT
Sicily
March / September 2019
Conceived and Curator
Alberto Ruce
In collaboration with
Carla Costanza (Giniusa) – Videomaker / Graphics
Supporters
La Biddina, Tre60 Lab, Nur, Graniti murales, Trinart, Association Poggioreale Antica, Municipality of Delia, Museo Sociale Danisinni, Push, Mansouricing, ResPublica Temporanea .
Transumanze it’s an artistic video project on the go. Carried out between March and September in Sicily, a region of southern Italy, in 2019.
It is a work of artistic research on micro-migration, on the depopulation of small villages, on the abandonment of local traditions, and on the fragile link between man and nature. This project was fueled by anthropological research, meetings, paintings, murals and video interviews to create a documentary.
One of the goals of Transumanze is to focus on small and marginal realities, which are present all over the world, and that includes Sicily. As transhumed cattle leave hilly areas to find food, so do people: they migrate. From one place to another, from where the opportunities are scarce to somewhere where to seek for new resources. At the same time, transumanze (“transhumance”) is also an ancient breeding technique that is so complex that it has become unusual, abandoned over time.
Abandoned such as so many customs that are being forgotten, from processing homemade food to artisanal creation. Whole worlds that are fading together with the memory of the small gestures and their symbolic meaning.
The project, created together with the graphic designer and video maker Carla Costanza, started in March 2019. During the months preceding the Transhumances project, we conducted research on the territory to choose the places where we would have intervened. We worked for each stage in close contact with the local associations that helped us mediate with the local inhabitants and supported us in the project.Each stage is a mural, paying particular attention to the creation of a link between the work and the territory that hosts it: most of the images used to create the murals and other works are images extrapolated from the video footage of Carla Costanza who carried out a documentary on the territory, entering into relationship with the inhabitants of the place and the places they live. The whole project is a tribute to the inhabitants, to the history of the places, and to the problems that the territory is facing.
” We were greeted by “strangers” for a coffee or dinner together, completely spontaneously, with a spirit of pure benevolence and kindness. The human exchanges that we experienced and touched us are the soul of the project. ” (Carla Costanza – Giniusa)