16 QUADRIENNALE D’ARTE, ROMA, 2016. In the exhibition DE RERUM RURALE curated by Matteo Lucchetti.
insipired and dedicated to Casa delle Agriculture (Castiglione d’Otranto, Lecce)
video HD and painted banners(2016)
photo (optical bench): Francesco Quarta Colosso
video editing: Luca Mattei
Luigi Coppola’s installation, comprised of a video and a series of painted banners, is a visual rendering of a process that has been underway since 2013 in the Salento ara, in Castiglione d’Otranto (LE, Italy) to be precise. Here the artist, together with the local association “Casa delle Agriculture”, has created the Parco comune dei frutti minori: a participatory project that has redeveloped areas used for fly tipping, converting them into cultivated areas focusing on biodiversity and the common good.
The concept of mixed seeding (evolutive population) practiced in the Parco Comune dei Frutti Minori, that allows the ground to “choose” which seeds to make grow, overturns mainstream agricultural practice and is also a metaphor for integration between migrant, asylum seekers and local community.
In the artwork the concrete utopia from Castiglione is confronted with the painted words on the banners, inspired by the book News from Nowhere or an epoch of rest, a work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist and socialist pioneer William Morris (1891)
In the novel, the narrator falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this society there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems. This agrarian society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work.
