'Nuovo Grand Tour' features Artinvita and Dentro La Terra

As part of our partnership with Artinvita - Festival Internazionale degli Abruzzi, we are honoured to be part of ‘Nuovo Grand Tour’, a programme designed by Institut Francais - Italia to provide young artists artists from France and Germany with opportunities to work in Italy on their projects.

We are humbled to be part of this project along with some of the brightest cultural institutions and creative spaces of Italy, such as Base Milano, Casa degli Artisti, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Citta dell’Arte, Palazzo Butera, Palazzo Monti, Cirko Vertigo, Corte Ospitale, Cross, Oriente Occidente, Spazio Fattoria, Dolomiti Contemporanee, Kultur Factory, Landworks, Random , Villa Lena e Wonder Grottole.

As part of this collaboration with Artinvita - Festival Internazionale degli Abruzzi, Dentro La Terra will be more than happy to host French visual artist Baptiste Anne.

Based in Normandy, Baptiste Anne articulates his artistic practice around nature, vegetation and more specifically the tree. Over the years, he has experimented with various mediums such as photography, sculpture, video, sound and drawing. He continues his work by working on the different states and forms of the tree. His work focuses on understanding the tree as part of our society and ecosystem.

At Dentro La Terra Baptiste Anne will have an opportunity to continue his experiments and to showcase his work as part of the next edition of Artinvita in 2023.

Dentro La Terra becomes a 'Diversity District' in September 2022

Dentro La Terra is pleased to announce the launch of a new partnership with Montreal-based cultural center “Diversity District”. Through this partnership we reaffirm our commitment to support authors from marginalized and diverse background, including BIPOC, racialized, LGBTQ+ writers by giving them access to an inspiring creative space and providing them with good conditions to write freely.

Dentro La Terra is proud to be able to provide these authors, often subject to exclusion, alienation, precarity and uprooting, with an opportunity to form social bonds, discover other ways of life, and partake in fertile conversations and exchanges with artists and communities with different histories, imaginaries, and visions of life.

We are excited to share also the beauty of Abruzzo with authors from diverse backgrounds who can root their literature and creation in a healthier relationship with the earth. With this programme taking place in September, we look forward to exposing our residents to the grape harvest and wine making that will be in full swing at that time of the year.

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DIVERSITY DISTRICT 2022 RESIDENTS

As part of this programme we will welcome in September stephanie roberts. Based in a small town in Quebec, stephanie roberts is a prize-winning poet, widely published and critically praised. Her work has been featured in numerous periodicals and anthologies, in Canada, the US and Europe. Born in Central America, stephanie roberts grew up from the ages of two to eight, as an undocumented child, in Brooklyn, New York. She attended New York University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Marketing. For a few years thereafter, she worked in a number of New York City department stores. After growing disillusioned with the grind of retailing, she took a sabbatical, undertaking biblical studies for a year, subsequently receiving a diploma with high honors. She eventually emigrated to Canada where she lived in and around Montréal before settling, as a citizen, in the Beauharnois region of Quebec. At Dentro La Terra she will work on a new project tentatively titled ‘Poems Across the Americas’, a semi-autobiographical poetry manuscript consisting of poems which traverse the poet’s experience as citizen of three countries: Panama, the US and Canada.

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At the same time, Dentro La Terra will also be welcoming Kimberley Ann Surin. Based in Montreal, Kimberley Ann Surin is a French-Canadian filmmaker with Haitian descent. Over the years, she worked on a variety of projects, including fiction, documentary, advertising and animation. She has gained experience working for several production companies, including Warner Brothers, Reel FX, Sphère Média Production, and Aetios Productions. In 2020, she directed and wrote her first documentary ‘Against All Odds’, a short movie about the lack of diversity in professional and junior hockey. In early 2021, she directed, wrote and produced her second short film ‘Nourrir les Rêves’ which premiered at the HotDocs International Film Festival and is now available on Crave. The focus of all her creative work is to uplift the voices of black, marginalized, and under-represented talent in front of and behind the camera. At Dentro La Terra Kimberley Ann Surin will be working on a feature-length fiction film.

A stay at Dentro La Terra, as experienced by Kongstad Studio

Our 2021 residents Cecilie and Tobias Kongstad documented the work of artists involved in Artinvita2021, their interaction with communities and included Abruzzo as an element of inspiration in their creative journey across Italy’s regions.

by Cecilie and Tobias Kongstad

We arrived on an incredibly hot Sunday in June where Nicola greeted us on Dentro La Terra’s terrace with a warm smile and a cup of coffee – we instantly knew this was going to be good.

Dentro La Terra itself was already packed with artists, so we got the chance to stay at the family farm. What a setting it was - olive groves as far as you can see and fresh homegrown plums and figs daily. We also got the chance to taste Nicola’s father’s wine made in his small cantina at the property, all natural and without added sulphites of course.

Our stay was planned to coincide with Abruzzo’s international art festival, Artinvita, and our mission was to experience and document as much as possible from the festival, the other residents’ work and what the area has to offer in general.

Before Artinvita kicked off we got the chance to meet Simon Rouby, an incredibly inspiring individual and artist. He was working on an installation of his ongoing project ‘Pangea’ for the festival. His art uses a technique where several pictures are taken of an object from different angles which is then inserted into a computer and then transformed into 3D models with help from an algorithm. The models can then be viewed on a monitor in three dimensions.

In Simon’s case the objects of choice are often landscapes which he ‘scans’ (by taking numerous pictures of the same spot) using a drone to gain access to difficult spots and angles. He has done it in several unique places already such as Nepal and near the South Pole. The end result can then be a 3D printed model, a 2D printed model or an interactive exhibition using various projectors.

The method is called photogrammetry and is actually also used by geometrists to map and monitor landscapes and their natural movements and erosions. We even got to join Simon for an expedition to Ortona where he scanned ruins of an old castle.

Simon’s installation for Artinvita was outdoor, using projector screens to convey his art onto the medieval buildings around the Auditorium Santa Maria da Piedi.

Pangea

Aragonese Castle

Foraging

Alessandro Di Tizio in his foraging tour

Discoveries

A short walk in the Majella National Park is enough to find oregano, wild garlic, elderflower, fig leaves and other berries with incredible taste.

Majella National Park

The national park was recently declared a GeoPark by UNESCO thanks to its geosites, some of which are well-known in the international literature because of their scientific relevance.

With local youth

While Alessandro Di Tizio works for world class restaurant Mirazur, he used the opportunity of Artinvita21 to educate local youth on food and nature.

We attended several shows on Artinvita’s schedule and another one that really stands out was a foraging tour for kids in the Majella mountains.

We followed Alessandro Di Tizio in an attempt to forage wild herbs in the Majella National Park while educating local youth on food and nature. He works with the world’s best restaurant, Mirazur, on educating chefs on wild ingredients and the history of them and also educates the restaurants’ foragers on what, how and when to pick different herbs. It is safe to say that we and the kids got to learn from the best.

We found oregano, wild garlic, elderflower, fig leaves, a yellow flower-species with a really strong earthy curry-like scent and taste, a rosemary-like herb that had similarities in taste but with very spicy and peppery notes not to mention red and orange juniper berries. After the foraging we got to enjoy several dishes made with all the aforementioned ingredients made in collaboration with Ristorante Villa Maiella (also decorated with a Michelin star).

Then came a chance for us to work on our artistry. Cecilie is an illustrator and works mostly digitally, but when Marielena ‘Mae’ Carulli contacted us with a unique opportunity to make a permanent mark in Arielli we were in. We were invited to take part in a street art event to paint a mural on a city wall. The town mayor held a speech about the importance of art and set the tone for the project.

We were a group of artists gathered by two amazing women with a vision: the theme of the project was “the art of hugging”.

About the project Marielena ‘Mae’ Carulli says: “The hug factory is a project of social and artistic value, born from the collaboration of two women, with a common passion: art. It wants to be a way to exercise a period as hard as a pandemic.”

What’s even more amazing is that you can now experience the amazing street art pieces right below Dentro La Terra.

We ended the art festival with a get-together that turned into a party for all the artists and organizers of Artinvita Festival. Nicola hosted all of us at Dentro La Terra with tasty bubbles, aperitivos and later pizza from Giangi’s - voted Italy’s 26th best pizza. We can confirm it is incredible!

So not only have we been fortunate enough to meet a lot of incredible and inspiring people, Dentro La Terra is surrounded by amazing nature - mountains and beautiful small villages in one direction and the beach in the other. The perfect balance of time, space and serene atmospheres.

When reflecting on the time we spent with Dentro La Terra it feels almost as if we had a year’s worth of experiences while still being able to recharge. After the stay we felt high on inspiration and the will to do new things with our art and in life. That was our goal from the start and we succeeded – even more so than we thought would be possible.

Thank you Nicola and Dentro La Terra, we are deeply grateful for the experience.