Gavoi, Former Barracks

Opening Saturday 10 June 2017, 5:30 pm

Up to 2 July 2017 

As part of the Prelude to the “L’isola delle storie” Festival, the Casa delle Letterature in Rome and the Museo MAN in Nuoro are pleased to present the exhibition Anne Franchetti. The Creation of Petra Sarda, curated by Ileana Florescu and Maria Ida Gaeta. 

The renovated spaces of the “Ex Caserma” in Gavoi will be the site of an exhibition of a selection of works in grès by Anne Franchetti, an Italian-American ceramist, along with photographs by Ileana Florescu and Ottavio Celestino. 

Anne Milliken Franchetti’s life path has unfolded in various countries and languages, resulting in an original creative endeavor that is a fusion of experience and autobiographical memory, reflecting her surroundings and identity as an artist. In over forty years of activity, Anne Franchetti has taken an innovative approach to Sardinian ceramics, as the first artist on the island to use stoneware to create plates and crockery, mixing in, among other things, ashes of indigenous flora (ferule, eucalyptus, lentiscus and strawberry plants, etc.) to create an extraordinary and unique range of glazes. Over time, Sardinia would become her adopted homeland, where she has carved out a personal and a collective space for her aspirations to become reality.

This project began in the late ‘Seventies — following two fundamental journeys, during which she got to know Bernard Leach, the father of modern English ceramics, and learned the Faenza ceramic technique. Then, near her house in Capo Ceraso, she built a wood-burning kiln, where she fired her early ceramics. This dream subsequently evolved into the creation, in 1984, of the company known as “Ceramiche di San Pantaleo” — which she later generously turned over to a local collaborator — and the emergence of “Petra Sarda.” 

The book, published by Imago Multimedia in conjunction with the exhibition Anne Franchetti. A Sardinian from Maine, includes texts by Marcello Fois, Franco Masala and Edoardo Sassi and photographs by Ottavio Celestino, Simon d’Exéa and Ileana Florescu, as well as an homage by Claudio Abate. The life journey of this great ceramist is related through first-person accounts by people who have shared her artistic experience; the publication also conveys Franchetti’s process and includes a series of images of her ceramics, seen within the context that inspired them: the Sardinian earth, rock, sea and sky. Words and photographs work together to compose a captivating portrait of a life devoted to creativity. 

The exhibition will be on display at the Casa delle Letterature in Rome – Piazza dell’Orologio 3 – opening on 20 September 2017, 6:00 pm.