A territory as a laboratory

In 1994 an artist from Roccascalegna persuaded colleagues from half of Europe to come and live in this valley and leave a work behind. Not in a gallery: in the landscape.

Land Art was born in America between 1967 and 1969: artists left the galleries and made the landscape both the subject and the material of the work. Sand, earth, water, shrubs, tree trunks, stones.

Thirty years later, in a valley in Abruzzo, Sebastiano De Laurentiis — born at Roccascalegna, back living there after Rome, Berlin, Basel and New York — decided that the idea could work here too. On 19 September 1994, in Lanciano, the association “Comunicazione Arte Natura” was founded, with its seat at Roccascalegna.

Cultural and artistic production and growth, understood as the rebuilding of collective relationships of communication and commitment between different individual paths, between social groups, villages and valleys of the Sangro-Aventino area.

First you live there, then you work

The method was precise. In 1996 the artists were invited to stay in the area: to get to know the places, the history, the traditions of the communities. Only in 1997 did they put forward projects and sketches; the works came the following year, together with solo exhibitions held in the castles scattered through the valley.

Glass in the wound

Between Torricella Peligna and Gessopalena stands La Morgia, an enormous limestone mass — a morgia, in local usage — which legend says Samson carried here on his shoulders from the Maiella. Until after the Second World War it was used as a quarry, and the blasting left a break at one end.

In 1997 Costas Varotsos filled that void with sheets of glass. The result is an inverted blue-green triangle that changes with the sun, the moon and the weather: green, blue, brilliant, colourless. In the imagination of Abruzzo it is becoming the symbol of a region made of both sea and mountain.

Trees that come back to the surface

During the excavations to lay out the Serranella Oasis, large trees were found buried in the gravel several metres down: mostly pedunculate oaks. The place names had said as much — “Selva Piana”, “Selva d'Altino” — but nobody expected them there.

De Laurentiis recovered them and set them out again on a mound of sand dredged from the river, along with broom and dog roses. He called it “La collina degli alberi morti” (The Hill of Dead Trees). Above all it is the landscape of emptiness, of an absence — ours — that gives the advantage to what is full.

A short distance away, in the pool, Nunzio Di Stefano placed “La Biscia” (The Water Snake): Carrara marble that in profile is a water snake, head on a sea monster and, from a distance, a pair of lips suspended between earth and sky. There is no single shape: it depends on the light, on the wind, on where you stand.

Sebastiano De Laurentiis died in the summer of 2019, at the age of 81. The works have stayed where he wanted them.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible what is not always so.