The big SPECCHIA

Grande specchia is an approximately five-metre sculpture composed of an accumulation of stones of various sizes, an iron crown and olive branches. The sculpture has a circular base and is erected using the dry stone wall technique. The work appears as megalithic architecture in the form of a pyramid with a circular base and a pointed rock at its end. The large pile of stones at the top is surrounded by a crown made of intertwined iron wires. The crown was made by young people from San Vito dei Normanni during one of the workshops. Some dried olive branches from the pruning were arranged in a circular fashion at the base of the sculpture. The work was entirely created with materials found on site, it is a kind of symbolic recombination of the elements of the place. It wants to give solemnity and power to these usually little considered elements, agricultural and reclaimed land waste. The work is also a clear tribute to the Specchie, heaps of even very ancient rocks about whose origin archaeologists and historians have different versions. For some it was a way to have lookout points on the plains, thus to raise the viewpoint and look far into the distance, for others they were the result of agricultural reclamation, for others still they had a sacred and magical value. The work is also a tribute to rural knowledge, to the organic intellectual* who handed down the knowledge of megalithic architecture. The work is also a tribute to the rocks and the geology of the earth and wants to shift the observer’s point of view from anthropocentric to ecocentric, it wants to highlight the stones as a central element from both an aesthetic and conceptual point of view. Grande specchia is this and much more, the author likes to leave a veil of mystery about the meaning of Specchia as of this sculpture, open to the free interpretation of the observer.

Andreco Studio, Climate Art Project, Xfarm Agriculture Next, Pigment Workroom and Mural Arts Institute Philadelphia present COMMUNITY FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION and XFARM LAND ART – the first rural art park rural art park on land confiscated from the mafia in Apulia.

Land art works realised by young citizens under 18 together with Italian artists*, transforming confiscated farmland – which has been abandoned for years – into a different and biodiverse future. confiscated agricultural land – for years abandoned and since 2017 becoming the Xfarm Agricoltura prossimo project in San Vito dei Normanni (Br) – into an art park among olive groves and vineyards, open to citizens and visitors from all over the world, under the banner of the economy of beauty and legality.
This is the Xfarm Land Art project promoted by the Qualcosa di Diverso cooperative in collaboration with Pigment Workroom and financed under the P.O. PUGLIA FESR 2014-2020 Axis IX – Action 9.6 – Notice ‘Beauty and legality for an Apulia free from mafias’. The project actively involves boys* between 14 and 17 years old from the province of Brindisi in a path of 4 cycles of workshops with the objective of realising works of rural art through the use of artistic languages and tools that, by connecting artistic-cultural disciplines with agronomic, ecological, social, economic and historical disciplines, interpret and give new life to typical of the agricultural season and the natural materials present in the field.
By delving into and studying the morphology of the land, the agro-environmental conditions, the history of the property history of the confiscated property, memory and commitment, the alternatives of the civil economy to the mafia economy, the project aims to activate a collective reasoning on the cultural and symbolic dimension of confiscated assets as common goods, thus strengthening the feelings of re-appropriation and belonging on the part of the younger generations and local citizenship towards real estate taken away from the criminal economy and long abandoned.
On 18 March 2023, the Rural Artistic Park opens its doors to all*, inaugurating the spaces with the Green Classrooms by the visual artist Andreco, the first land art works created during the first ‘Autumn’ art workshop between November and December 2022. Bringing the inspiration of his multidisciplinary Climate Art Project, Andreco led the girls and boys in the design of the AULA VERDE planted at Xfarm in December 2022 in a public event open to the participation of local citizens. Two concentric circles of plants that, following the agroforestry model, form a biodiverse green theatre, a place of meeting, sociality, ecological and cultural ecological and cultural education.
To further strengthen this path, the United States Mission in Italy contributed to the production of Art and Community for Environmental Action, a project that renews the exchange of best practices between the two realities of Mural Arts Philadelphia and Pigment Workroom, focusing on the relationship between art, community and climate justice.
The occasion was the candidature for the Annual Program Statement (APS) 2022 of the U.S. Mission Italy, where the network includes XFarm, Andreco and IRSA-CNR scientists in collaboration with IRET-CNR. The project will run until July, straddling the two continents, carrying out actions that show the urgency of having to change the anthropocentric version of the use of planet Earth by humanity. This will happen starting from research and scientific knowledge, such as those that the CNR in Taranto is putting to good use by planting shrub species to mitigate fine dust pollution.

Taranto thus becomes the second setting for Art and Community for Environmental Action, with the involvement the school community of the Istituto di Istruzione Superiore Statale Augusto Righi, leader of the network Ecodidactics network, in order to proceed together with the scientists to plant trees in the school in order to deduce from their leaves data on the accumulation of harmful dust from the industrial area. At the same time the network of partners, Philadelphia Mural Arts, artists Shira Walinsky, Michelle Glass and artist Andreco will participate in the collective design of a mural that can speak about these issues with a contemporary language as that of urban art.
Thanks to Art and Community for Environmental Action, in addition to extending the virtuous process of XFarm Land Art also to the city of Taranto, at the end of the workshops with the young people in the two cities, Andreco will be able to create a symbolic sculpture of the relationship between man and the environment in the Xfarm Land Art park in San Vito dei Normanni.

The result of this lengthy process has been brought back to Philadelphia where the Italian partners traveled in end of July for an incubation programme within the Environmental Justice Programme of the Philadelphia Mural Arts.