Dove non sono mai stato, là sono

Every year, twenty artists spend time in residence in twenty villages and towns with fewer than five thousand inhabitants and off the beaten tourist track—one for each of Italy’s regions—connecting with the local context and conceiving a response in the form of an artistic intervention, which may be temporary or permanent.

After the first edition, which emerged as an almost spontaneous reaction to the sudden halt of cultural initiatives due to the pandemic, year after year Una Boccata d’Arte has continued to reflect on its vision and modus operandi, expanding its scope to reach one hundred projects realized across five editions—that is, one hundred artists and one hundred towns involved since the project began (that number will have reached 120 by the time this exhibition comes to a close).

Without the utopian pretense of seeking to provide an exhaustive overview, Dove non sono mai stato, là sono brings together a multitude of traces, fragments, and testimonies of various kinds generated over the course of the five editions, moving across different times and places and enacting a process of “excavation” and reconstruction of an almost archaeological nature.