La Sardegna è un’isola?

“La Sardegna è un’isola?” [Is Sardinia an Island?] is a cycle of four conferences held in peripheral areas of the Sulcis region (Saridinia):  Sant’Anna Arresi, Montessu, Buggerru and Iglesias. We believed that, because of their historical, symbolic and aesthetic values, these places deserved to be given a new life.

International curators and artists, hosted and welcomed in these small towns, had an exchange with a public without specialized knowledge of the subject, who thus had the chance to enter into the midst of international artistic debates.

The conferences spawned numerous ideas and projects, most of which Cherimus realized in the flowing years. The second part of the project, in fact, was ‘The Names of the Trees’ – a series of walking workshops held over the space of a week, where international curators and artists, together with locals and the students from the Art School of Iglesias, have explored places in the Sulcis that are rarely visited or have just been forgotten (such as the church of Bindua, the mines of Monteponi, the Punic area of Monte Sirai, the mount Pranedda, Punta Sebera, and the mines of Serbariu) 

Writing about the project, the art critic and curator Simon Njami said: “It is a simple idea: …to invite international artists to work in places that deserve to be brought to life again because of their historic, symbolic, or aesthetic values. The idea is to invite the islanders, affected by all the problems linked to insularity, to enter the contemporary age through the creation of public artworks, without struggles, without speeches or concepts (in Kant’s sense), and to take back what was once their heritage. But a heritage, like a custom, only makes sense in a dynamic perspective, through its permanent re-evaluation and adjustment to contemporary questions. The old utopia of art for everybody and from everybody is here at work. The inhabitants of the most secluded corner of the island will have to face the representation of their environment and, thanks to the strength of an external glance, will be introduced to a magic that he himself had somehow already partially forgotten”.

The artists and curators who took part in the project were: Cristiana Collu, Alberto Garutti, Lucy+Jorge Orta, James Putnam, Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, Alfredo Jaar, Simon Njami, Mario Cristiani, Silvio Ciappi, Fransiska e Lois Weinberger, Zarina Bhimji.