From 12 September to the end of October, Matera and various municipalities across Basilicata are the venues for the “So Far So Close. Esercizi di vicinanza” Festival of Performing Arts produced by the Matera Basilicata 2019 Foundation, with artistic collaboration from Silvia Bottiroli and Cristina Ventrucci, in partnership with APT Basilicata and ASM Matera and under the patronage of the Municipalities of Matera, Montescaglioso, Venosa, San Mauro Forte, Cirigliano, Latronico and San Severino Lucano.

The “So Far So Close" programme offers exercises in proximity as a way of re-embracing the existing reality through the performing arts, with a new awareness of our shared lives in an "infected planet", and rediscovering the force of collective action. These exercises also form part of a renewed citizenship, in the wake of the experience that made Matera and the whole of Basilicata a special place for shared creative processes and the relationship between art and space in the course of 2019.

Through the research carried out by the Open Design School, the Festival is an experiment aimed at putting on live events in the time of COVID by means of a study of new relationships and codes of social behaviour so that notwithstanding the distance between them, participants in the performance can feel that they are fully involved and protagonists in it. Emblematically, the name "So Far So Close" is an expression both of the work that is intended to be done on the new relations among people in the time of social distancing and the new relations that can be constructed between urban and remote areas, as part of a collective re-education that will define new rituals for spending time together and new ways of exploiting public spaces. As part of this experiment, all the artists will be called on to engage with the methods of the Open Design School, which in a co-creative logic that proved to be a highlight of Matera 2019, will bring together professional expertise from various disciplines: from experts in infectious diseases to security engineers, from designers to artisans and from architects to cultural inhabitants. The outcomes of the process of research and experimentation will come together in an open source manual, a kind of box of tools or vademecum that will be available to everyone.

The visionary crossovers that go to make up the programme are led by artists from the performing arts who have renewed their demands at this time of the pandemic, in which negotiating the distance between bodies is of crucial importance and requires particular care and delicacy when thinking anew about opportunities for live encounters. Proximity is a central element of their work, including in terms of the relationship between interpreting reality and constructing the imagination, in which the theatre in all its forms and with all its influences – from drama to performance, from the relationship with the cinema and music to dance and from the experience of public and relational art – becomes a tool for studying relations and places through intertwined narratives, and dedicating attention to the relationship between the human and the non-human and between the visible and invisible in a city that has always brought these dimensions together as its vocation. When reflecting on these hubs, the curators have focused on artists and works that use public spaces by giving them a new significance and making them more complex through forms of openness that can include audiences not only through the enjoyment of a finished work but, in very different ways, through the responsibility for constructing it; that are interested in the relationship with the various communities that make up the urban fabric, rural areas and the places within them; and that develop an idea of childhood and play capable of breaking through conventions.

In Matera, Emma Dante brings an evocative performance-concert to the stage at Cava del Sole to sublimate the pain the pandemic has brought with it, leaning on Greek tragedy as a form of catharsis; Virgilio Sieni returns with two new pathways involving citizens between Agna and Borgo La Martella; Chiara Guidi stages one of the most important works from children's theatre; the Deflorian/Tagliarini duo return to the work of the Dutch artist Lotte van den Berg with an itinerant pathway through the centre of the city; and the MK company performs in the Via Saragat car park, which becomes a new location for artistic visions of the city. The programme also extends into the inland areas of Basilicata: Venosa, the Lucanian city which is a candidate to become Italian Capital of Culture for 2022, and Montescaglioso host Sieni's manifesto of the art of choreography; Annamaria Ajmone performs a choreographic score in Latronico and San Severino Lucano, at two locations where nature meets the contemporary works of ArtePollino; and Luigi Coppola returns to Cirigliano and San Mauro Forte with two public art works in close contact with local communities. The schedule is completed by the Open Design School's Open Reviews in Casino Padula, a time of reflection to present the status of its work on participatory conception and planning, and the European Heritage Days, which will make it possible for visitors to discover the Teatro Quaroni in Borgo La Martella in Matera.

Access to all the Festival events is free of charge, but must be reserved on the Matera-Basilicata Events platform (www.materaevents.it). All the current anti-COVID measures will be scrupulously complied with during the events, and the public are invited to collaborate fully with these efforts.

Statements

"With this Festival", explains Rossella Tarantino, the Direttor of the Matera Basilicata 2019 Foundation, "we want to start putting on live events again to fill a gap left by the cancellation of numerous cultural productions in a year that is so important for relaunching the activities and cultural ferment we have successfully generated in previous years. We will achieve this by asking the questions posed by the pandemic in terms of social relations. Finally, we will seek to consolidate the legacy principles of Matera 2019: co-creation, breaking down the barriers between artists, designers, professionals and audiences and the relationship between urban areas and inland and marginal areas, further strengthening the ties between culture and tourism, thanks also to our collaboration with APT, so that we can enable permanent and temporary citizens to "inhabit culture"".

"As soon as we arrived in Matera, one of the first words we heard, as if it had been sculpted into the rock, was "neighbourliness", a term that characterises the structure of this unique city and its original sociability", say Bottiroli and Ventrucci. “We worked on closeness as a topic that relates to both the relationship between human bodies – and therefore community relationships and the trans-individual dimension – and public spaces in the city as a place where desires and needs remind us of the dimension of the many, and no less importantly, the essential connection between humans and non-humans, and therefore the profound need to look at ourselves today in relation to natural landscapes and elements. When we prepared our programme, we also focused on artists and practices that can include the public in the construction of the work, and not only in its performance. We were very well aware of the pitfalls hidden in every proposal to participate, and of the initiatory potential of emotion in an artistic process. We also pay close attention to childhood in terms of both an original gaze and a reinvention of language through the potential of play".

"Culture offers one of the principal opportunities for travel, and for this reason it is fundamental to the development of tourism in the territory", emphasises the Director of APT Basilicata, Antonio Nicoletti. “With a programme spread between Matera and various Lucanian municipalities, the So Far So Close Festival enables our region to return to the cultural tourist scene, empowered by significant numbers in terms of the presences recorded during the summer season, which gives us a good deal of hope for the autumn".

"Despite the great difficulties the tourist sector has faced as a result of the pandemic", notes Marianna Dimona, the Deputy Mayor and Tourism Councillor of the Municipality of Matera, "we are pleased that the city has still succeeded in attracting tourists. With the So Far So Close Festival, Matera is starting out again with its programme of events open to the public, and is doing so from an iconic location, the Cava del Sole, one of the few places in the South that can hold up to 1,000 people in the open air. It's a showpiece for us, but also a model we need to continue to enhance".

Salvatore Adduce, President of the Matera Basilicata 2019 Foundation: "With the festival that begins on Saturday with the Emma Dante performance, we are starting out anew with a series of activities that further strengthen Matera's position at the top of the list of cities that produce culture in Italy. We may be the only place in the South to have organised a festival of this kind under circumstances as difficult as the pandemic. Our strength is that we can also rely on a place like the Cava del Sole, that we are able to exploit certain features of cultural production such as co-creation, which is very much in demand among our citizens, and that we understood some time ago the need to move our events into the inland areas throughout Basilicata in the belief that culture can help reduce the risks of depopulation and social decline".

 
Artistic programme

The programme ranges across different kinds of artistic world that have emerged from the karstic dimension of the flows the curators have identified as they prepared the itinerary, brought together by the same thirst for the search for beauty.
With I Messaggeri, Emma Dante, with the participation of the Sicilian musicians Fratelli Mancuso, has created an evocative concert performance to sublimate the pain the pandemic has brought with it, using Greek tragedy as a format that purifies a community that has passed through a mystery of existence in unison through a process of catharsis. It is this work, which has recently debuted at the Spoleto Festival, that we wanted to inaugurate the programme at 9:00 p.m. on Saturday 12 September by summoning citizens to the expansive and evocative Cava del Sole.
The second Festival event takes us to the inland areas of Lucania, with the presentation of a highly poetic work in the squares of Venosa (Friday 18 September at 9:00 p.m.) and Montescaglioso (Sunday 20 September at 9:00 p.m.). This is Solo Goldberg Variations, the most iconic solo dance in the career of Virgilio Sieni, a world-class choreographer and dancer, and a multi-award-winning artist on the international scene. This solo performance, which represents the manifesto of the artist's choreographic art, the apex of his study of the body and the languages of dance and figurative art, extends beyond formal approaches and codifications to allow a profound vision to emerge. In the metrics and intangible architecture of Bach's Goldberg Variations, which are played live on the piano, Sieni's dance evokes picturesque memories, hinting at a complex flow of prostrate figures drawn from Italian art from the 14th to the 17th centuries. They are never cited directly, but are affectionately evoked in an intimate act that asks to be shared.
Alongside this performance, Sieni, with his company, has developed two separate participatory events, Dolce Lotta, which focuses on our emotional and tactile relationship with objects, and La Tattilità delle Chiome, which encourages us to listen to nature. They are respectively targeted at citizens who signed the Manifesto for participation in Matera 2019 in the La Martella district (from 19 to 26 September, with a presentation to the public at 6:00 p.m. on Saturday 26 September), and at the community of the Agna district near Casino Padula (from 19 to 24 September, with a presentation to the public at 6:00 p.m. on 24 September).
The site-specific staging of one of Chiara Guidi's most important works for the children's theatre, La Terra dei Lombrichi, has an exclusive feature: it is an itinerant experience set in the outside spaces of Masseria Radogna, involving children in the emotional development of scenic action. Founder of one of the world's best known contemporary theatre companies, Societas (formerly known as Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio), working for decades in search of a form of theatre that reinvents language partly through a child's gaze, Chiara Guidi has rewritten – especially for Matera – the "errant" drama of a journey with a happy ending that takes its inspiration from Euripides' Alcestis and ventures beyond the threshold into a world in which by constantly stirring the earth, earthworms bring what had been buried back to the surface. The project calls for the involvement of locally-recruited actors and teachers through a workshop entitled An actor's work before the eyes of a child, and will take place between 29 September and 4 October, with a presentation to the public on Friday 2 October (at 11:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. and Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 October (at 11:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Places are limited).
The choreographer Annamaria Ajmone presents her solo work Trigger in two different locations curated by ArtePollino in Parco del Pollino, where nature meets art. Trigger is a choreographic piece that places itself in the locations it inhabits and takes a fresh look at stage layouts in relation to landscapes and architecture. This is why it was decided to complete the vision with walks and visits across the places where the work will be implanted: to Anish Kapoor's Earth Cinema on Friday 2 October at 6:00 p.m., with a walk in the Valle del Sinni starting at 3:30 p.m.; and to Carsten Höller's RB Ride carousel on Friday 3 October, with a walk in the Valle del Frido starting at 3:00 p.m. (places are limited on both days). The programme for the days curated with ArtePollino concludes on the morning of Sunday 4 October with the presentation (in Latronico at MULA+, the Museum and Library of Latronico, at 9:45 a.m.) of the results of the Ka Art. Towards a choral mapping of Basilicata project developed for Matera 2019, followed by the walk in the Valle del Sinni and the guided visit to Earth Cinema.
In Cinema Imaginaire, Daria Deflorian and Antonio Tagliarini, who have become well-known in recent years for a form of theatre that goes beyond the perception of reality through delicate, incisive disorientation, return to the work of the Dutch artist Lotte Van den Berg, and ask small groups of spectators to look at the life of the city as if it were a film, writing their own script for this personal overview. By pointing the gaze at something that is already known, this experience, which will take place around Piazza San Francesco and Piazza Vittorio Veneto and will be based in the Hall of Palazzo Santa Lucia, rediscovers the ability to project new narratives and visions, like a pathway back to the origins of the cinema (from Tuesday 6 to Thursday 15 October at 6:00 p.m., with two performances on Saturday 10 October at 11:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. There will be no performance on Monday 12 October).
In the same space, we also find the joyous invasion by MK, the company directed by Michele Di Stefano, with Bermudas Forever, a wild choral choreographic work based on powerful music and a system of gestures that produces perpetual movement. Designed to be "a condition for existing next to others and building a rhythmically shared world", this performance was included in the programme with the precise purpose of representing a bath of vital energy that then ultimately involves the audience in its turbine of energy in a free and protected form (Saturday 24 October at 9:00 p.m.).
Luigi Coppola, who has previously been the author of itineraries in 2019, continues his public work art in close contact with the communities of the inland areas. His project entitled Il Paese dell'Abbondanza (Visions for a festival of agriculture and pastoralism), which originated from his desire to work on certain signs and gestures in communications between humans and animals by creating an installation inspired by the passage of transhumance in the borgo, will take place in San Mauro Forte on Sunday 18 October, starting at 10:30 a.m. His initiative will be completed by a meeting entitled Praticare la restanza (at 3:00 p.m.) on topics around the depopulation of rural areas. The second edition of La parata delle stagioni che verranno, which is inspired by the traditions of the agricultural carnival and dedicated to the reopening of the abandoned sheep-tracks, will be held in Cirigliano starting at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday 25 October.