It was one of those days in May when everyone is thinking of the smell of the road and freshly cut flowers while the water of time flows invisibly, yet very clearly underground,. This is karst land that hides its secrets but gives back happiness and energy to those who know how to watch, see and hear. Perception is a quality that the people who built the Sassi protected more than anything else. The fiery passion of our fighter farmers pays homage to their passion for life, a way of living on art that gave birth to the art of living.
Early history, which was denied the legibility and dignity it so deserved, produced men and women capable first of understanding drawing and then painting as an extension of their understanding-taking possession of - which produced the Sassi, sons of the habitable harmony we speak of and which is spoken of throughout the world. The water of time and the time of water follow and chase each other every night and every day until painting, which can do and see everything, imagines torrents accompanied into tiny, rounded cisterns that welcome them into their lap. A network of mothers channelling the water without ever constricting it, before turning it into an architectural design to be accessed to quench one's thirst. The water network of the Sassi di Matera is the reason why the town is a Unesco Capital and the system of cisterns linked to the natural streams is the archipelago of possibilities that the great decision-makers, such as the ancient people of Matera, were able to imagine.
That day in the old Neighbourhood of Corte San Pietro in May 2013, Allfredo Pirri, Fernando Ponte and I tried to follow the example of our ancestors and we thought we would be able to formalise all these abstract concepts into real, concrete, experimental and verifiable works, with which to build new opportunities: that these values, these visions of a golden section deeply rooted in people’s nerves and arteries of the men could still translate into nerve and blood systems and architecturally accommodate the present conditions of the town and the world. The peripheral nervous system is similar to the water system in nature. As the Egyptians used to say: "As above, so below". Centuries of positivism and the presumed light of reason brought darkness to our ability to hear. Thus, only art remained to feed the senses. And what's more. Only art provides the opportunity to return the vital truths hidden by the darkness of reason from below to above.
This is why Pirri chose to reconnect the interior with the cistern to the courtyard outside and thus metaphorically reconnect the courtyard within with the entire town. The artist speaks of waiting as a feature that identifies Southern Italy: Waiting is a common, widespread feeling among the people from the south.
This is not passive behaviour. On the contrary, it shows faith in something the imagination continually moves over time into a future space, rather like a spaceship lost in the sky that floats aimlessly before finding the right orbit to bring it back home. Here in Matera, we have been waiting for five years for what we had imagined to become real, a long time that was not without purpose, but rather a useful time to discover and understand one another by inventing coherent forms and images to match the city space. A time used to bring to life the underground noises that make it appear to be alive, like a hungry, rumbling intestine ready to excrete any excess. I think everything in Matera happens below street level. Dual carriageways run parallel, each oblivious of the other: the one on the surface with its lights and paved streets and the other below, vibrating and gurgling with broken fragments. I have placed a filter between the two which explodes like the top of a jar that has guarded a mystery for too long and that is cooling down now it has launched the seal that kept it closed into infinity.
Within, beside and opposite the work, we wait for the seal to be returned forever to the open, unknown space.
Idra, Alfredo's work, in which poetry, art and architecture blend together to recover their single context, reveals a relationship between the cistern and the neighbourhood, below and above, the caves and the road, the closed and the open in a metaphorical sense, shall we say. It adds lost steps in the rediscovered Sassi, and clouds of light living in functional locations to bring them back from the make-believe of mere play- acting, the wondrous form with no function for the soul, by giving them back the task of raising awareness of the opportunity to construct places for saved souls, to enrich the imagination, and encourage intelligence to gather round the fire, lymph to surface, useful, authentic memory that is so precious for the future, dreamt of and marked by thousands of years of prosperity and harmony.
Francesco Cascino, Curator of di Matera Alberga, Welcoming Art
Matera, 20 December 2018