The Fondazione di Sardegna, in collaboration with the MAN Museum, opens in Nuoro the exhibition Twelve ee h s nine - Dolmen and Menhirs in Sardinia by Olivo Barbieri, curated by Marco Delogu and Chiara Gatti. The artist's unpublished series concludes his work within the framework of the Sardinia Commission, a project that supports the path of production of contemporary artworks through the AR/S Arte Condivisa platform, with the aim of opening a window on the territory, history and stratifications that characterize the island, through the gazes of curators, artists and artists invited to live experiences of residence and production in Sardinia.
Olivo Barbieri, one of Italy's leading contemporary artists and photographers, was invited by the Fondazione di Sardegna to turn his gaze to the island, to undertake three journeys over two years, deciphering a space-time bubble between archaeology and contemporary imagery. The object of the research is the heritage composed of numerous megaliths, dolmens and menhirs scattered over the island, according to logics still unclear to scholars, observed in their ability to modify the space that surrounds them.
Barbieri, who had already traveled extensively to Brittany and Carnac in the 1980s, attracted by these megalithic monuments, the mystery of their genesis and function, albeit years late and with a certain sense of guilt for having waited so long, arrives in Sardinia to approach an equally unique heritage, little publicized, even for many almost unknown.
Guided by the wise disposition of scholars such as archaeologist Riccardo Cicilloni, by the indications of local inhabitants, by researchers and local memories, Barbieri in Twelve ee h s nine - Dolmen and Menhirs in Sardinia returns a reconnaissance, a free and unscientific sensory mapping of megaliths, but above all he tells how the space around them has changed, how the world has changed through forms, stratifications and unconscious logical steps.
In his travels from Dorgali to Laconi, from Calangianus to Barrali, Barberi explores adventurous paths among cultivated fields, pastures and villages in search of vestiges sometimes swallowed by vegetation or concrete to restore them to the present: "I have worked and reflected a lot on the modification of the space around each find, how eras have passed by superimposing grafts, layers, passages. It is a syncretic temporal narrative," the artist explains.
Accompanying the exhibition is a book with 105 photographs published by Punctum Press with texts by Andrea Cortellessa, Riccardo Cicilloni, Marco Delogu and Franco Carta and a dialogue between Olivo Barbieri and Chiara Gatti.
Olivo Barbieri, Twelve ee h s nine - Dolmen e Menhir in Sardegna
Softcover, 24 x 28 cm, 176 pages | Punctum Press | ISBN: 978-88-95410-42-5
Designed and made by Nicola Veccia Scavalli