EXODUS – L’abbandono dei paesi

After watching a magnificent documentary on the abandoned villages of Calabria, made in collaboration with Vito Teti, I began reading this author's books on the depopulation of villages and discovered a poetic and wonderful world where anthropology merges with poetry, literature, and the deeper culture of places and historical events. All of this enriched, fascinated, and intrigued me. It was a period in which I was dedicating my artistic work to the unsustainability of cities, a theme that runs parallel to that of the abandonment of villages, two sides of the same problem of the unsustainability of places: large, overcrowded metropolises and the villages abandoned in the exodus toward them. The works resulting from this inspiration have been collected in a catalog. The collection includes a limited numbered collection of oil paintings titled "Borghi," created using steel plates, and several paintings on canvas and paper, dedicated to abandoned villages, their walls, and their houses. These mixed-media paintings are made with recycled paper, an upcycling technique now familiar to me.

They are all evocative images exported from my mind and imported into paintings on paper and canvas.

There is no direct reference to any real place; they are only "mental" images. The collection is dedicated to Professor Vito Teti and his magnificent work on the themes of abandoned or depopulating villages and "restanza," the resilience of those who remain and live in old villages.