I fiori politici
This year the abundant rains have given Puglia a luxuriant nature, as it has not been seen for a long time. The blooms have transformed the landscapes into the subjects most photographed by tourists and wayfarers, especially the dense expanses of poppies and daisies, up to the roadsides and in the dry-stone walls. Thanks to pressure from farmers, committees and activists, the cutting of spontaneous plants envisaged by the Anti-Xylella Plan has been postponed from mid-April to the end of May and mid-June, when flowering is now coming to an end. A long and generous spring, also thanks to this lack of human intervention, leads us to rethink them for this simple but ambitious project these days; as it was for Matisse during the war, when insisting on flowers seemed indifferent and was instead an inner manifesto of spiritual resistance.
Flowers possess a universality that many cultures have translated into a true symbolic language. In Japan there is an ancient concept, Oubaitori, composed of four ideograms that indicate trees in bloom — cherry, apricot, peach and plum — and which means: “Each one blooms in its own way and in the time, it needs”. An invitation to consider one’s path unique, freeing oneself from competitive confrontation and the anxiety of the passing of time. Political flowers embody the contradiction of the artist, who also transfers a political choice to the flower, if we also consider the choice of beauty, or resilience, as such. Their apparent, brazen indifference makes them an inopportune setting, when they proliferate despite everything: under the dry olive trees of Salento, or in the shade of a nuclear power plant (Derek Jarman’s garden. Yes, let’s face it: they don’t care, and indeed, they abound! As long as they exist, we can consider ourselves safe; contemplating them we may feel the need for commitment, reflection or meditation and at that point they will appear less harmless to us.
Ferragosto is a space dedicated to projects, exhibitions and the exchange of experiences and visions, in the heart of one of the many tourist destinations in Puglia. Its name evokes the summer celebrations around August 15, with the epilogue of the fireworks and the first storms of August, when the melancholic turn of another summer that ends silently already creeps in.