BAROQUE BLUE Ionian SeArt Residency 2024

NATURE AND SHAMANIC COSMOLOGY: THE LOWER WORLD

from 29 June to 11 July 2024

Multimedia Arts in the Nature

Baroque Blue Ionian SeArt Residency is an art project signed by Primo Piano LivinGallery that sees protagonists in each edition, artists, poets, writers, performers, filmmakers, musicians, and their Art Curator in one of the most beautiful places in Salento: Santa Caterina di Nardò and Porto Selvaggio Regional Preserve Park in Apulia’s region, Italy.

Baroque Blue 2024 with the residency project “Nature and Shamanic Cosmology” proposes a journey between anthropology, archaeology, psychology and contemporary art to discover the fascinating world of shamans, through a multidisciplinary path that dialogues with elements of Apulian shamanism ( eerie anthropic masks, Neo- and Paleolithic graffiti, atavistic rituals related to the Taranta myth, drums, ritual costumes and trousseaus, zoomorphic god-figures of the popular bestiarium) with immersive installations in nature and artworks produced from the imputs received.

But what really is shamanism? Who are shamans and what do they do? Can we consider these figures the most ancient mediators between humanity and nature? The basic point of the project is the stylized human figure of a “dancing shaman” woman in the graffiti of Porto Badisco Grotto on the Adriatic side and considered as the first artistic and spiritual testimony of Salento, elected as an undisputed symbol of the ancient history of this part of Italy, but also other elements such as the anthropic masks found on monuments, facades of palaces and depictions of Apulian popular Iconography. Shamanic practice, combined with archaeology and contemporary art, moves from a spiritual or therapeutic dimension of nature to an artistic practice that crosses over, the environmental issue, a theme of absolute topicality: in fact, starting from the work-manifesto Defense of Nature by Joseph Beuys, a shamanic artist par excellence, the residency, suggests a respectful and conscious coexistence in which human beings do not live outside or in antithesis to the animal, natural or spiritual worlds but are part of them.

Contact Information:
[email protected] or [email protected]