The Celebration of the Living 2, Venezia/Lecce

The Patience Sanctuary in San Cesario di Lecce

MICROCLIMA and LU CAFAUSU present
The “Celebration of the living (who reflect upon death)”, 2011 (second edition)
A sculpture workshop, a trip, a conference, a celebration.

Between October 30th and November 3rd the second edition of the “Celebration of the living (who reflect upon death)”. This edition will be articulated in the form of a complex workshop which will take place in the Serra dei Giardini in Venice, in San Cesario di Lecce, and on the bus between the two places. The celebration is a project by Emilio Fantin, Luigi Negro, Giancarlo Norese, Cesare Pietroiusti and Luigi Presicce.

The steps of the workshop are the following:

VENICE
Oct 30 and 31, sculpture workshop at the Serra dei Giardini: all the participants, individually or in small groups, will reproduce Polipo (Octopus) a sculpture made by Ezechiele Leandro taken from the sculpture garden “Santuario della pazienza” (Patience Sanctuary). Once the sculptures are made, the participants will discuss and decide their further destiny.

During the workshop several events will take place, that are open to the public, among which:

Oct 30, 2011, 5 pm Monologues interpreted by Jacopo De Santis. Texts by Brocchi, Gaber, Laforgue, Maupassant, Pirandello, Zola.

Oct 31, 2011, 5 pm Gabriele Mina, anthropologist, editor of the book Costruttori di Babele. Sulle tracce di architetture fantastiche e universi irregolari in Italia, Elèuthera 2011, will present his research on artistic sites in Italy created by outsider artists. Microclima - Serra dei Giardini, Viale Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1254, 30122 Venezia - Castello
info(at)microclima-venezia.com
www.microclima-venezia.com

Nov 1 (only for the participants to the workshop) – bus trip from Venice to San Cesario di Lecce (approximately 12 hours); on the bus a conference with interventions by the participants on the themes related to the celebration will take place.

SAN CESARIO DI LECCE
Nov 2 – public celebration of the “Festa dei Vivi (che riflettono sulla morte)” and possible installation of the sculptures. Morning: Visit to Lu Cafausu and to the Santuario della Pazienza.
From 8.30 to 11.30 pm, in the Laboratorio di Arte e Architettura “Archiviazioni”, in Lecce, via Enzo Ferrari, contrada Pisello, Night party and cafausic happening with music from an almost forgotten Italian repertoire, curated by Oh Petroleum and Luca F.

Last year, on November 2, 2010, AND AND AND* has invited Emilio Fantin, Luigi Negro, Giancarlo Norese and Cesare Pietroiusti and Luigi Presicce and they have proposed to turn the November 2 traditional celebration of the Dead ones, into a new holiday: “La Festa dei Vivi (che riflettono sulla morte)”, “The Celebration of the Living (who reflect upon death)”.

For this celebration, the artists invited everyone to be part of a pilgrimage, probably the shortest and slowest in the world, having as a departure point and as its destination, Lu Cafausu in San Cesario di Lecce. The celebration and the pilgrimage wanted to represent a reflection upon death as transformation, threshold, mystery, but also as a necessary perspective of meaning.
The pilgrimage was also the occasion for a visit to the “Sanctuary of Patience” and an homage to the figure of Ezechiele Leandro.

Lu Cafausu is a mysterious small building, an architectural remnant that the artists have elected as a source of metaphors and narratives. It is “an imaginary place that really exists” around which the presence of death is floating. Any day, the small building can in fact be demolished to accommodate more parking space for cars, or can also fall apart due to its precariousness. It could also be turned and frozen into a monument.
Because of this feeling of the presence of death, Lu Cafausu is an ideal place for a new celebration, “La Festa dei Vivi”, who, in order to give sense to life, reflect upon death; their own, first and foremost. www.lucafausu.tk

The Santuario della Pazienza by Ezechiele Leandro (1905-1981) is an extraordinary example of mystical garden, a forest of statues, a temple or a cemetery, an almost unrepresentable site of the artistic power and expression of a self-taught dilettante artist, a singularity completely out of the grids and schemes that define and separate high and low culture. 


* ANDANDAND is an artist run initiative, which is using the time between now and dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 to consider with individuals and groups across the world the role art and culture can play today and the constituent publics or communities which could be addressed.

AND AND AND / Event 6 / Pilgrimage from Lu Cafausu

 

The Celebration of the Living (who reflect upon death). A pilgrimage from Lu Cafausu for AND AND AND, in the frame of dOCUMENTA (13), San Cesario di Lecce, Italy, Nov. 2, 2010.
Ph. Ayreen Anastas.

A False Luke (Lu Cafausu)

A while ago, before the summer, in the courtyard at Careof in Milan, Efrem, a guy with a beard, told me he came from San Cesario: «I live on the edge of town, at lluca fausu», he said, with that sly Salento accent. I thought: «He lives in a false Luca, at Luca-the-fake… whatever.» Over the next few days, for no apparent reason, I kept thinking about this fake Luca. A couple of months later we were driving through San Cesario, Alessandra had a blue wig, it was three in the morning and we were on our way home from a party. We had ingested red wine, rum and chinotto, and I had chewed some mint leaves. «I want to show you something – she said. Have you ever heard of the lu cafausu?» I couldn’t believe my ears. Around two bends and down two one-way streets (the wrong way, she was driving) and there was the fake Luca. A dozen buildings surround what might almost be called a piazza. At its center stands a strange structure (more of an “object”) in crumbly masonry, a weird sort of pagoda with a Middle Eastern air (a crescent moon on the roof), fragile, almost an eyesore. Efrem’s neighborhood doesn’t take its name from some dishonest Luca, but from a “coffee house” (twisted by local dialect into “lu cafe-haus-u”) that has been many little things for many long decades: a gathering place for peasants, a gazebo that provided shade for noblemen and English officers as they sipped tea, a dwelling for a young orphan and his white horse, a henhouse, a toilet, a garage for a Lambretta, a sexual trysting place, a farmer’s tool shed, an illegal gambling joint, a dream object and, last but not least, the site of performances by four artists. It was and is an inadmissible spot, a territory of accumulation and absence of meaning. A metaphor, perhaps, of what we might become.

(Translation by Steve Piccolo)

a False Luke (Lu Cafausu), a collaborative project by artists Emilio Fantin, Luigi Negro, Giancarlo Norese and Cesare Pietroiusti. January 26 (7-10 pm) – March 04, 2007

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