60 unpublished color photographs and a large wallpaper

On March 3, the Sardinia Foundation, in collaboration with the MAN Museum, inaugurates the exhibition Twelve ve ee hs nine – Dolmens and Menhirs in Sardinia Of Olivo Barbieri , edited by Marco Delogu and Chiara Gatti.

The artist’s unpublished series concludes his work within the Sardinia Commission, a project that supports the production of contemporary works of art through the AR/S Arte Condivisa platform, with the aim of opening a window on the territory, the history and stratifications that characterize the island, through the eyes of curators, male and female artists invited to live residency and production experiences in Sardinia.

Olivo Barbieri, one of the major contemporary Italian artists and photographers, was invited by the Sardinia Foundation to turn his gaze to the island, to undertake three journeys over two years, deciphering a space-time bubble between archeology and contemporary imagination .

The object of the research is the heritage made up of numerous megaliths, dolmens and menhirs scattered across the island, according to logics still unclear to scholars, observed in their ability to modify the space that surrounds them.

Barbieri, who had already traveled extensively in Brittany and Carnac in the 1980s, attracted by these megalithic monuments, by the mystery of their genesis and their function, even if years late and with a certain sense of guilt for having waited so long, arrives in Sardinia to approach an equally unique heritage, little known, even for many almost unknown.

Guided by the wise availability of scholars such as the archaeologist Riccardo Cicilloni, by the indications of the local inhabitants, by researchers and by local memories, Barbieri in Twelveve ee hs nine – Dolmens and Menhirs in Sardinia it provides a reconnaissance, a free and non-scientific sensorial mapping of the megaliths, but above all it tells how the space around them has changed, how the world has changed through unconscious shapes, stratifications and logical passages.

The photographs record authentic situations of coexistence and interpenetration between the archaic past, recent buildings and the vegetal landscape.

The artist has broadened his gaze from the single site to the anthropized landscape, towards inhabited contexts that have absorbed the volumes and history of these extraordinary objects of resistance, in a new scenario, modified by the context of the finds and their influence, inspiring new images and new architecture.

Olivo Barbieri, through this investigation into variation, with a clear observation process free of linguistic frills, but taking the perceptive possibilities of seeing to the extreme, traces an imaginary geography of Sardinia that is profound, silent and different from the well-known beauty of the internationally famous coast.

In his travels from Dorgali to Laconi, from Calangianus to Barrali, he explores adventurous routes between cultivated fields, pastures and villages in search of vestiges sometimes swallowed up by vegetation or concrete to return them to the present.

In the dialogue with Chiara Gatti published in the catalog Olivo Barbieri says: «I worked and reflected a lot on the modification of the space around each find, how the eras passed by superimposing grafts, layers, passages. It is a syncretic temporal tale…”

As Marco Delogu and Franco Carta write in the text that accompanies the exhibition: “the shapes of the stone are imbued with time and Barbieri captures their mystery, encloses color and light in the frame, enhances their aesthetic strength, questions their suggestions magic and the symbolic-sacral value that dolmens and menhirs have always evoked in the mind of the observer, be he a scholar or a layman”.

Barbieri’s work is consistent with the original productions of the Sardinia Foundation created in recent years, productions whose objective is to tell the island through the vision of art, asking protagonists of primary caliber to restore an image of the island in dialogue with the most dynamic national and international creative contexts. From this dialogue emerge the signs of an unusual Sardinia that, at times, we struggle to recognise.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with 105 photographs published by Punctum Press with texts by Andrea Cortellessa, Riccardo Cicilloni, Marco Delogu and Franco Carta and a dialogue between Olivo Barbieri and Chiara Gatti.

BARBIERI OLIVE TREE

Twel ve ee hs nine – Dolmens and Menhirs in Sardinia

From 4 March to 25 June 2023

Continuous opening hours: 10am – 7pm | Monday closed

Press Office: UC studio – press@ucstudio.it

Chiara Ciucci Giuliani chiara@ucstudio.it – ​​mob +39 3929173661

Roberta Pucci roberta@ucstudio.it – ​​mob +39 3408174090