"Because the landscape is a living organism with tactile capacities: it touches the uncovered nerves of the soul and makes them vibrate—if you allow it. And because it is not just a beautiful view, but a spiderweb in which the thinking and doing of generations remains entwined."— Prof. Mattia Pacilli, a resident of Bassiano (LT) for Una Boccata d’Arte 2024

Dove non sono mai stato, là sono (Where I’ve never been, there I am) is a narrative of the first five years of Una Boccata d’Arte, the itinerant project born in 2020 from an idea by Marina Nissim and realized by Fondazione Elpis. The mechanism is simple: every year, twenty artists spend a residency in twenty villages and small towns with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants and off the main tourist routes—one in each Italian region—connecting with the local context and reimagining it through an artistic intervention, whether temporary or permanent. What began almost as a spontaneous reaction to the sudden halt of cultural initiatives during the pandemic has, year after year, evolved its vision and modus operandi, expanding Una Boccata d’Arte’s reach to encompass one hundred projects in five editions—that is, one hundred artists and one hundred communities since the project’s inception (they will become 120 by the time this exhibition is over).
Far from any utopian claim of providing an exhaustive picture, Dove non sono mai stato, là sono gathers a multitude of traces, fragments, and testimonies of various kinds generated over the five editions, moving through different times and places and engaging in an almost archaeological process of “excavation” and reconstruction.