This is not an exhibition!

The Matera 2019 exhibitions were immersive experiences, the result of a journey to search through the Lucanian collective memory. In order to offer a rich and diversified reading of each topic dealt with, each project carried out data collection and analysis work together with sector professionals, artists and citizens: international calls, artistic residencies and workshops were the tools used to reach this objective. The result was a varied proposal of exhibitions and shows thanks to which visitors received new stimuli that changed their way of experiencing the works and installations, no longer a visual-passive approach, but a lively, active and recreational interaction with objects and installations.

'La Secretissima Camera de lo Core' is not an exhibition, but an emotional journey, a (re)discovery of Matera through the eyes of the artists and citizens who participated in the 'Atlas of the city's emotions' project: a research path which led to the collection of 4,000 stories related to Matera and its history, but not the one written in books, the one lived by its inhabitants; 400 people, from 10 to 80 years old, turned into emotional mappers, telling their memories related to specific places in the city.

The project 'M.E.M.O.RI.' opened for the first time in Matera the 'Euro Mediterranean Museum of Re(f)used Objects', an interactive space in which things forgotten or found on the street, things that we tend to ignore, have been offered to the visitor as a tool for reflection and connection with other realities. The work, in fact, involved five Mediterranean cities (Genoa, Marseille, Malaga, Tunis and Tétouan) and five Lucanian cities (Bernalda, Venosa, Matera, Muro Lucano, Potenza) leading to the creation of a real travelling museum that expands the concept of community.

Bread can be considered as an icon of Matera's cultural heritage: the city identifies itself with this food and through it connects to thousands of other cultures, because bread is synonymous with life, well-being and community. Within the festival dedicated to this food, the art critic Andrea Del Guercio wanted to nourish with art "that sense of expectation and demand for beauty" which bread as the "primary food in human society" is expected to satisfy. From this primordial need comes the exhibition 'All the loaves of the world': a collection of sculptures, installations and performances, pictorial and photographic works by more than 40 artists from all over the world.

Amongst the Matera 2019 exhibition events, the sound events certainly stood out for their originality. Sound art, in fact, represents the true contemporary artistic avant-garde: in a society where noise pollution has a significant adverse impact on people's lives, to establish a dialogue with sounds, pay attention to the effect they have on us, in a context of absolute silence or in interaction with other sounds is a very powerful introspective experience.