Clearings
Spaces for pausing, seeing and reawakening the soul of a place.
It all began in the hills above Florence, around the tables of the ARCI community centre in Monteloro, the village where I live. I felt the need to bring images out of museums and classrooms and place them back at the centre of everyday life, as one does with bread.
From that first experiment came the Clearings: series of encounters and close-knit cultural paths designed for libraries, community centres, Case del Popolo, museums and festivals that care for the living fabric of a place.
The symptom: the anaesthesia of looking
Cities such as Florence live with a paradox. On one side, culture is consumed at extraordinary speed: images are photographed, stored on a phone and immediately digested, reducing art to litter, disposable visual debris. On the other, some of the richest questions in our history are confined within specialist language and treated as dead matter reserved for a select few.
In both cases, the image is separated from its condition as a living presence. The work stops speaking to us and becomes either something to consume or a logical puzzle to solve. Clearings grew from a refusal of this anaesthesia, creating room again for attention, exchange and fermentation.
The experience: thinking together
In the Clearings, art history is not a sequence of dates. It becomes a way of reawakening our capacity for wonder. We always begin with the physical reality of an image: a sculpted gesture, a detail in a fresco, the geometry of a garden. From there, its force can call up a constellation of resonances between myth, philosophy, literature and landscape.
These are occasions for shared thought rather than conventional lectures. Whether it is a public conversation, a series of images viewed together in the dark, or a walk through a landscape, the work can once again become an emotional, political and sensory fact, capable of speaking to the questions of the present.
Cultural heritage remains alive only when it nourishes relationships between people.
The map and the workshop
Clearings can take shape wherever culture refuses passive entertainment and becomes a form of community:
There are no ready-made packages. Each Clearing is shaped together, listening to the character of the context and to the questions of the people who will inhabit it.
Very little is needed to begin: a room, a white wall on which to project light, some chairs and a few people willing to look closely. Everything else can be sown together.
Let’s talk«Toute la vie va s’envelopper d’art.»
All of life will come to be enveloped in art.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale, 1865