Hangar (R)evolution

I-DEA is one of the two pillar projects of the Matera 2019 programme. Starting with art, museology and anthropology archives as the topic of discussion, the intent was to recover the heritage contained in the Basilicata archives and revive it thanks to the collaboration of artists and designers. This gave rise to an ever-changing exhibition space, where the elements chosen by the first curator were reworked, moved or replaced by the second and so on, allowing the single element to become the bearer of multiple meanings depending on its different positioning.

The artistic duo Formafantasma take over 'The Two Cultures' and transform them into a 'Unique Vision', highlighting how the anthropisation of the region derives from original interventions in which archaic rituals play an important role. Thus, was born an exhibition that tells of a continuous relationship between humans and nature, choosing video as the main medium. Five large projections and ten screens create a superposition of images, triggering a process of systems of relationships that is always different. Amongst the few physical elements selected, we see once again the carvings of Giuseppe and Giovanni Di Trani.

The third part of I-DEA sees choreographer and dancer Virgilio Sieni in the role of curator for the first time ever. His atlas is made up of several levels: display boards with photographs and images grouped into five types of movement; ten plinths called 'accumulations' hold over a hundred objects taken from the houses of ten inhabitants who in turn donated a gesture to the choreographer; visitors had the opportunity to learn about them by visiting the exhibition. The final level of the exhibition is composed of a series of practical sessions, workshops and performances with citizens, based around gestures. Each movement embodies various possibilities, which is why the gesture, for Sieni, is connected to infinity.

Artists Navine G. Khan Dossos and James Bridle are of British origin: the influences encountered during their journey in Basilicata have led to a reworking of the I-DEA archives that show an alternative reality to the one we know. Starting from the prehistoric masks of Gianfranco Lionetti and from the living archives that tell of Basilicata's recent past, the curators highlighted the non-human communication between the region and its inhabitants: the Land of Cockaigne is the vision of a society capable of generating its own future drawing on its own history and traditions, without relying too much on what comes from the outside, tearing down one of the widely-held stereotypes, that of an immobile and uninhabited South.

With 'Inhabiting the archives: Life, Movement and Collection', an exhibition curated by Pelin Tan & Liam Gillick, the great I-DEA workshop comes to an end. For the fifth and final exhibition, the curators have chosen the theme of inhabiting as a paradigm to analyse the society in which we live and what we would like to build. Through abundant documentation, and without forgetting references to past exhibitions within the project, Tan and Gillick cross Basilicata from the second post-war period to the present day, focusing on daily life and the world of work of a recent past, passing through the 1950 agrarian reform and the exodus from the Sassi stone districts at the end of the 1940s, to then arrive at today's influx of migrants from the Mediterranean. In this way, the exhibition offers a different interpretation of post-war Italy, useful for looking at through a new lens the current social changes from an all-Lucanian perspective.