Origins

Franzosini’s Ercole stood in a corner of a portico at Tenuta Petrolo in Ticinallo, where for an indefinite time it had kept company with an old Fiat 500 and a few other objects of memory. What held the whole together was the dust that gave body to the thickness of time, because dust is a resource of time, in a sense its voice, something that reveals by covering.

On that Sunday in June, Tenuta Petrolo hosted Attimi d’arresto. Polvere, sfocature e rotolacampi, an exhibition that invited several artists to measure themselves against that place and especially against its memory, evoked by the countless objects that had marked the lives of its inhabitants. In the form of a country outing, the artists and their audience took part in a series of mostly impromptu interventions that activated the place and traced a kind of collective narrative, in which what had been surfaced in the present in search of new paths of meaning.

Redeeming it from an abandonment that never had the sense of a final separation, but rather of forgetfulness, a negligence, or perhaps a wait. The idea was to start a restoration capable of going beyond the strictly technical dimension to embrace the expressive one. Negligence, guarded by the dust, appeared as the occasion to spark a new story, and this is why, seen with hindsight, it can be read under the sign of waiting. Today, a few years later, that wait projects itself into a new life that once again involves several artists. A community in dialogue and in progress which, crossing the technical register of restoration in the strict sense, will give rise, over a long time marked by the twelve labours, to new stories around and from Ercole: twelve events for an adventure with its feet in the past and its gaze within the horizon.