The Dello Scompiglio Project and Camera #3 (Chamber 3)

Sue Broadhurst; Susan Broadhurst

doi:10.16995/bst.7972

Figure 1

Tenuta Dello Scompiglio. SPE – Performance and Exhibition Space. Courtesy Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio

The following information concerning the overall project can be found on the website: https://www.delloscompiglio.org/en/project.html

Created in 2003 and directed since then by the artist and theatre director Cecilia Bertoni, the Dello Scompiglio Project comes to life from the homonymous estate located just outside Lucca, Tuscany.

A unique poetical, physical and mental garden taking shape as a single body in which culture, agriculture and gastronomy seamlessly interweave. Three interdependent realities coexist within the estate, carrying out a dynamic process focused on research, with particular attention to environmental care and landscape development. Alongside the restaurant Cucina Dello Scompiglio and the organic farm Azienda Agricola, the cultural association ‘Associazione Culturale Dello Scompliglio’ has, since 2007, presented an intense multidisciplinary activity, linked to visual and performing arts. The programme, which in recent years has seen itineraries and seasons related to specific themes, with open calls and residencies for artists and Dello Scompiglio’s own productions and creations, spans exhibitions and installations, performances, concerts, lectures and activities designed for children and teenagers, with the aim of questioning the demarcation of boundaries and limits between the different disciplines that make up the contemporary.

The main nucleus of the Tenuta dello Scompiglio is an area of 50 hectares. Situated in the Vorno hills, it includes a centuries-old park with a villa that blends into a vast landscaped area creating a single large garden to the edge of the woods, agricultural areas and some restored farmhouses, which at present host artists-in-residence and collaborators.

Among the buildings dedicated to the Dello Scompiglio activities, refurbished according to the techniques of bioarchitecture, energy saving and environmental sustainability, are the Performance and Exhibition Space (SPE – Spazio Performatico ed Espositivo), the Cucina Dello Scompiglio restaurant and the Square House. The latter houses the offices of the cultural association (‘Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio’) and the agricultural, land and forest management (Azienda Agricola), the spaces for preparing and conserving fruit and vegetable products, the wine cellar and a room for Feldenkrais^® Method classes.

For centuries, the estate had been a self-sufficient farm, cultivating mainly olives, vines and fruit. Then, over several decades, it was abandoned and nature regained the upper hand, covering the surfaces with brambles and pines. The human imprint influences and structures nature, which, when left to itself, conquers its dominion in a disorderly way. Once the human being has interfered in an ecosystem, it cannot regain its independence. For this reason, the Dello Scompiglio Project set about re-establishing a dialogue both with the present environment, with all its natural and architectural elements, and with its history, seeking contemporary forms of interaction and responsibility. It is a relationship of interdependence, exchange and symbiosis, rather than exploitation: an interaction between various organisms. The human being, with its own organism, consisting of corporeality and senses, experiences and longings, shares with other human beings the organism of the space that feeds, warms and comforts him. Dialogue and activities with the land, the woods, the wildlife, the architectural elements, the visual and performance arts in outside and inside spaces contribute to the cultural research.

Cecilia Bertoni

Figure 2

Map of Tenuta dello Scompiglio. Courtesy Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio.

Camera #3 (Chamber 3)

Visiting Camera # 3 (Chamber 3) consists of a very pleasant, steep uphill walk of about twenty minutes, revealing stunning views of the Tuscan landscape. The interdisciplinary digital installation, housed in a small hut with only one audience member allowed entrance at a time, proved to be captivating, fascinating and thought provoking. It digitally and materially captured the fragmentary memories, dreams and fears of two women as they question their own identities. Certainly, well worth visiting if in the Lucca area. Details of the Installation are below.

Please see website https://www.delloscompiglio.org/en/culture/permanent-installations/chamber-3.html?id=145

INSTALLATION

CECILIA BERTONI AND CLAIRE GUERRIER

WITH CARL G. BEUKMAN

2014

Construction and technical crew Paolo Morelli and Cipriano Menchini

with Alice Mollica, Daniele Ghilardi and Alfredo Dell’Immagine

THE INSTALLATION IS IN A LITTLE HUT ON THE SCOMPIGLIO ESTATE. IT CAN BE REACHED BY AN UPHILL WALK OF ABOUT 15 MINUTES. ONLY ONE VISITOR AT A TIME MAY ENTER.

A room to discover – a desk where one can sit – a bed on which to lie – photo albums and books to browse.

The installation Camera #3 (Chamber #3) concludes a path begun in 2011 with the second stage created in 2012, in which two women question their own identities. A bedroom into which the visitors are invited to immerse themselves is an allegorical prison to distance themselves from daily life and enter a world filled with the references, evocations, memories, fears and dreams of two women enclosed within their own solitude. On the one hand, a physical, and moreover a mental, cage constructed using thin strips of wallpaper that illustrates a clear boundary between the coming of everything happening outside and a time that remains inevitably suspended internally. The story of a physical imprisonment, that drags with it obsessions, emotional obligations and thoughts, drawn through the weaving of fragments, the dislocation of the elements and the diversification of levels of interpretation. The narrative diary of an absence that pervades throughout the room in elements such as the bed, the pillows with sketches imprisoned between the fabric mesh and the embroidery, the table on which are innumerable memories and attempts to escape, the calligraphy of different signs, a picture closed up in the aquarium or the chair with books waiting to be leafed through. On the other hand, the solitary, evanescent and powerless presence trying to enter this prison whispering her own identity through the fragmentation of her body in images concealed by glass or protected under a table, a space overflowing with earth crammed with miniature new born babies and videos in which she seems trapped in the walls of the room or suspended in the environment. A presence just within sight, but which disappears as soon as you get close, remaining at the periphery, trapped outside the web. The need to ask questions relating to the role of herself in the context in which she operates, showing the body as a shell of memories and experiences that emerge stealthily, delicately, without ever succeeding to definitively burst in.

Together, they create an atmosphere in which the serenity of vision clashes with the complexity of thought, the calm effected by windows with the turmoil of the surroundings, and the intermittent sounds from the world outside with the noises heard inside. A piercing encounter in which the demographic, social, economic and cultural differences of the two women are negligible, and which winds through a place to escape from or adapt to. An externalisation of physical or mental prisons, past, present or future, that belong to us more than anything else and which none of us can forget. (Angel Moya Garcia).