Post Disaster Works

“Citri. Estratto da Val d’Agri” is the multi-layered outcome of a 3 week residency in the territory of Val d’Agri (Southern Italy). It includes a site-specific installation, a sound performance and a visual ethnographic investigation.

Val d’Agri is home to the largest oil deposit in Europe. Over the past 20 years, the territory has been dotted with oil extraction and processing centers, causing an environmentally fragile condition. Before the industrial turn, the territory was famous for music production related to the harp, and luthiery.

Val d’Agri is physically connected to the industrial port of Taranto through an invisible underground oil pipeline. The project interprets this connection-both physical and metaphorical-between the two territories through the production of a new imagery in transformation, made of images and sounds. We staged a dialogue between an experimental composer from Taranto and a local association linked to the recovery of traditional local music. The result is a work that is an expression of the contamination between natural elements, chemical agents, archaeological stratifications and geological stratifications.

In parallel, through a collaboration with photographer Gabriele Fanelli, we conducted a territorial exploration aimed at producing a visual investigation, in between an ethnographic research and the conception of a new landscape iconography.