Open Fields

The term ‘open fields’ has been used in agriculture since the Middle Ages. It defines the agreement regarding the ownership of lands, where no hedges separate terrains belonging to different farmers. In ‘open fields’, decisions are taken together and in full accordance with tradition. As a result, farmers cultivate their individually-owned plots of land and then redistribute the harvest proportionally. Given this conceptual stimulus, the exhibition presents the artists’ reflections on the concept of physical space, and on the metamorphosis of its uses and meanings made urgent by the radical changes we are all witnessing: the peculiar transformation of the places that we inhabit into all-day and all-night living spots, and the bizarre emptiness of spaces experienced daily before.

Sarah Roberts’ ‘Lockdown Papers’ is a diaristic response to the pandemic. The unexpected circumstances prompted the artist to shift her focus from outside places, their architecture, and interiors, to the private, domestic sphere, including family archives. Roberts takes on an intimate and delicate approach where the use of watercolors, photo-collages, and poetic records document a new, self-constructed, reality never explored before. Lidia Bianchi’s ‘Le Telluriche’ is a visual narrative that deconstructs pre-existing imagery of the telluric aspects of the Mediterranean, reflecting on the overall concept of gaze and distance, and producing a visceral and bleary archive of our sea. In the work, the artist draws from mythology to elaborate individual experience via the encounter with nature. Harley Price questions the idea of space in relation to the outer environment,
which comes to be pervasively transformed by looking at the enduring presence of rhythm of organic objects, and their mystical meaning. ‘Requiem of the Olive Trees’ depicts the physical world via musical notes, whereas ‘The Semiotics of the Cairn’ is a set of photos of an interactive sculpture inviting visitors to use stones as a form of memory of their visit to the first edition of the In-ruins residency.

Text by Dobroslawa Nowak and Nicola Nitido

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