ItalianWe met Gaetano in Loreto Aprutino in front of the Olive Oil Museum. We have all the directions to get there on the spot but this does not prevent us to stay with the car stuck in a narrow dead end under the amused eyes of some workers. It must happen often enough in this town and there must be no many diversions if these people after having seen us taking the road have not thought at all to warn us.
The museum is located inside the factory of his nineteenth-century ancestor, and Gaetano’s true tutelary deity, Raphael Baldini Palladini. He is really unique and interesting for the capacity that has proven to be ahead of times. Not only he has optimized the techniques of grinding and pressing olives but was able, as a true marketing genius, to bring his products around the world. In the museum there are pictures of his presentations at the major international fairs where you can see his modern attention not only to business communication, but to packaging and aesthetics of the bottles.
This attention, precursor of the times, is also visible in his decision to build the mill according to the stylistic dictates of a fantastic and almost gothic fable. The building, made entirely by bricks, typical of the architecture of these lands, has a corner solution with crenelated tower and lancet windows. Small brick sculptures, like micro-gargoile, found in excavations of fields, are interwoven with bricks. In this facade the curiosity of the antiquarian blends with taste for the fantastic. It appears that the author of the project was the artist Francesco Paolo Michetti with which Baldini Palladini had a close friendship. The same Michetti is the creator of the complex exhibitor with more shelf, designed to be disassembled and transported to the fairs, which resembles something between a Baroque fountain and a Liberty sculpture.
Palladini commercial cleverness also drove him to involve his artist friends (among whom there were the sculptor Costantino Barbella and the composer Francesco Paolo Tosti) to promote and enhance his products. And who knows if this patronage spirit is not transmigrated even in his great grandson Gaetano in whom, as he said in the interview, lives the love of the land with the one for the art, not as end in itself, but always as catalyst for new visions for the life of these places and their communities.
The museum is worth a visit, not only because you find all the details of the oil working through the beautiful and impressive machinery restored and put back in their places in the mill, but because you have the chance to see a beautiful architecture in its hybrid operation of housing, the upper floors, and factory, in the lower ones. We understand the need of the ramp that runs along the corner tower, almost a bow that divides the road and forces it to take two different directions, to allow carts to deposit the load of olives in the rooms of spreading. They are places where the olives were stored in small layers waiting to pass through the trap doors on the lower floor where there were grinders and presses. Today these rooms house the jars used in pressing and straining and labels and packing boxes used to send the aprutino oil worldwide.
The staircase will take you to the ground floor via the ‘”hell” a place where there were tanks for the collection of smelly by-product vegetation water. Strikingly, we find a loft right above where the “trappetari” went to rest, the workers 24 to 24 at the olive oil presses, also called in dialect “culiunde” greasy asses. The factory looks like an “oiled” (never as in this case) production machine and a metaphor of social and economic relations.
Returning to the day spent in the company of Gaetano, after this visit, which allowed us to understand the past, we went a few miles away to the Pollinaria farm. Here, however, is the present, and hopefully the future. To talk about this project between art and agriculture, we laid down in the shade of an oak tree while we saw all around the woods and cultivated land with cereals, alfalfa, vineyards and orchards.
At the end of the interview Gaetano could not resist and letterally dived into the spikes of his beloved “Senator Cappelli” wheat ( 1 ) to check the height, as it is done with children, placing the palm of his hand on their heads and comparing it with his own. They say that the spikes can reach the height of one meter and 80. We are well advanced.
(1) “The name of this variety was named in honor of the Marquis Raffaele Cappelli Abruzzo, Senator of the Kingdom ‘ Italy, which in recent years of the nineteenth century, and his brother Antonio, gave the start time of the agrarian reform in Apulia, and Nazarene Strampelli allowed to conduct searches, making available experimental fields under cultivation, workshops and resources. “(Source Wikipedia )
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Let’s start with Pollinaria: tell us when the idea was born and what is it about?
The idea for the project came from a kind of childhood memory. At some point in my life I found myself deciding what to do. I studied law at the Sapienza in Rome, but halfway through, I had the clear sense that I did not want to be a lawyer. Despite this decision, I decided to finish university even to have time to clear my ideas for the future. Meanwhile I was beginning to look at the art world and in ’99, with my brother and a friend, I made a trip through Europe in search of existing residences for artists, a way to learn about this world and, possibly, replicate it in Italy. Except that, we were 22-23 years old and the thing went over in a completely different way …
Like drunk and naked in a hippie commune?
Not really, I say only that it was the summer of the solar eclipse, and we were at the peak in Stuttgart. That experience marked me, I was halfway through college, and it drove me to New York where I did an internship, a volunteer in practice, at a performing arts center in downtown Manhattan. A truly extreme place, I was immediately thrown into the world’s most advanced contemporary art. It was what I needed, a total shock. This experience made me realize that I should take my degree as soon as possible and then do what I wanted.
What was the name of this place?
Franklyn Furnace , is now in Brooklyn, but the first one was in Franklin Street in Tribeca. In 2000 I returned, I started to study to finish while I started to take care of the family farm. This work strongly reconnected me to my family’s history in which the key figure was the great-great grandfather Raffaele Baldini Palladini. It is to him that we dedicated the first oil bottle produced in the company. In 2002 I graduated and I attended a postgraduate course in cultural heritage management, where I met Hela, my partner. It was then that I began to realize that I could put together these two worlds, agriculture and art. I thought about the project of artist residencies in Loreto Aprutino, in the building that once was the Baldini Palladini’s mill, where now the Museum of the oil is, but when I tried to work with the public, I realized that would be unfeasible with local funding. The idea of residencies has taken shape in the country, in an old farmhouse that seemed ideal, both for the ease with which it can be achieved, both for its size, a haven for artists and visitors. Using a loan for farm holidays we have renovated the building and, finally, in 2007, Pollinaria was born, synthesis of the idea of artist residencies and farm that then was already initiated five, six years before.
Before 2000, have you already been managing the farm?
No, because I used to live in Rome, and he took up my father. Moreover, after Raphael Baldini Palladini, all descendants have continued this company for tradition more than for vocation. For many years throughout my childhood, this was the place where I went with my father and my brother on Saturday morning, we made the rounds, talking with farmers, we went to get bread, eggs, it was a kind of self-reliance, the collection of food stocks for the week. The idea of developing the company has come in time, thanks to the decision to convert to organic crops. We started in 2003 and in the 2006 there was the first certification.
When did it start to be named Pollinaria?
Since 2006, although in 2007 there was the real start. I was looking for a name that would express the many aspects of the project and could not find one. One day, rummaging in the library of the house of Loreto, I came across a very old Latin-Latin dictionary and I decided to read it from A to Z, until I found the right name: pollinarium , from which Pollinaria.
What does pollinarium mean?
It’s a technical term indicating a botanical formation containing the pollen, found in some plant families. The basis of this attaches to the head of the bees that pollinate the flowers afterwards visited. It seemed to me that this name alone could contain the ideas of fertility, creation, regeneration. All ideas that I was interested in developing a project which I imagine as a kind of endless construction site, a cradle or incubator in which to integrate factors from different environments, but capable of fertilize each others.
Tell us about the artists who have hosted so far
At first it was simply the idea of artist residencies that intrigued me, then I thought it was really interesting to limit the scope of research and in particular to focus on artists who worked with scientific methods in some way. These “thinkers”, let’s call them, not easily classified as artists or scientists, have a particular vision of life in the future that merge from several traditionally distinct fields like art, science, technology, etc. etc.. It is an almost Renaissance approach, like Leonardo. This on the one hand, on the other I always found interesting the artists who work with nature and environment, seeking to reflect on the future of rural life.
Can you tell some names?
The very first, in 2007, was Mira Calix , a South African musician who composed and performed this mysterious work, almost a rite of initiation for Pollinaria. The first artist in residence was Nikola Uzunovski, a typical case of this relation between art, engineering, science and utopian vision of the future. He thought of a sun replica that might shine the territories of the Arctic Circle during the winter, a satellite to be launched into the atmosphere with a mirror inside capable of reflecting sunlight at certain places where there is social life, like the village square.
Exactly what he did?
He held a workshop and the first prototype of a miniature satellite, a sphere of about 2 m of diameter. We made several expeditions in the mountains, in Campo Imperatore on the Gran Sasso, where he experienced the reflection of light. At first light he positioned the sun disk in the most disparate places of the plateau and we watched him from afar and gave him the coordinates to try and see how it would reflect. The project is called My Sunshine , and developed in subsequent chapters, becoming more and more complex. The following year it was presented at the Venice Biennale, where Nikola raised his sun in the sky of the Arsenal.
In 2009 we hosted a Swiss team, etoy, which has for many years been carrying out a project called MISSION ETERNITY. At the heart of the project is a sort of digital archive of life that offers the opportunity to potentially save our memories forever. Their intervention was conducted during a weekend in which participants took what they wanted to keep – a poem, pictures, a song they had written – and the agents of etoy stored these data. Among them was a doctor with a couch and an electrocardiograph, which recorded the heartbeat and inserted it into the capsule. Everyone made the strangest ideas. For example, Andrea Gabriele created a capsule containing a concentration of physical traces and memories of his family who then buried in a hole dug under an oak tree. His digital “arcanum capsule” now contains GPS coordinates of this hole.
In 2009 we worked with an artist couple, HeHe , on a project on history and the consequences of man-made emissions from tobacco smoke to the exhaust industry, which examines smoking as a direct expression of human being’s activities. At first, Helen and Heiko Hansen – HeHe – came essentially to write a book about it, a compendium of their work devoted to this theme. Everything started out as something very meditative, quiet, except that during the residence they had the idea to create a special edition of this book that could be smokable. To give life to this idea, we grew tobacco plants and then dried the leaves in order to make the book pages. In fact there will be a standard edition in which only the first page will be smokable, a sort of ex-libris, and a limited edition entirely by tobacco.
The 2010 was the time of Futurefarmers group and their “This is Not a Trojan Horse”. When they arrived they had the clear idea of being on holiday, but after two days they went to work and created this huge horse, a human powered vehicle, a kind of huge hamster wheel. The idea was to make a real journey in the various countries of the region to question the premises of what the future of agriculture would be. The wheel interior was fully painted in chalkboard so they could directly write their thoughts, and the next country could see what the others had written.
Now where is this horse?
In the stable, of course. This project last year won an award from the Andy Warhol Foundation dedicated to artists and writers and was presented to Art + Environment Conference in Reno, Nevada, where we went to present the project. It was surreal because I prepared the speech accompanied by slides, all formal and perfect, but next to me was Amy Franceschini, the spokesman for the group, wearing a giant horse mask. After my speech she took out this hood like a war mask and began to recount the adventures of Futurefarmers trough the audience ovation.
Last year, however, it was the turn of lunar geese by Agnes Meyer-Brandis. Everything stems from a novel of the ‘600, The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin, a kind of antelitteram science-fiction novel where the author anticipates the theories of gravity and space travel. The story tells of a Spanish adventurer who flies to the moon drawn by a colony of geese. There he meets a peaceful civilization of fabulous aliens and then comes back to earth. This is just one of the inspirations behind the project, the other is based on the study of the relationship between humans and other living species according to Konrad Lorenz ethology studies. When Agnes asked me to form a colony of geese on which to carry out the test I have asked myself a thousand ethical problems, so I thought it would be interesting to combine this project with the will to protect endangered species. For this reason we went to take the eggs from a breeder of geese in Reggio Emilia Romagna in purity, on the 10th of April 2011, and we have been hatching them in an incubator for 30 days. Eleven geese moon were born to whom Agnes gave the name of famous astronauts, Yuri, Buzz, Neil, etc.. From the birth, began a sort of astronautics training, reading the stories of the moon landing to the ducks, fully dressed with a space suit and badge sewn on the spacesuit. The activities consisted mainly in excursions with the geese in tow, walking, cycling and even swimming pools in the country … Miccetta built a lamp shaped like moon, illuminated by a camping flashlight, which acted as guide during the night walks. Agnes concluded this period with a trip to Campo Imperatore, the perfect medium between the earth and the moon, where we did many shootings. With this video, the project had to finish, there was an agreement that the new generations of geese would be treated quite differently, except that a few days after her departure, in August, Agnes was at the Ars Electronica festival, where she met the curator of the English agency The Arts Catalyst who asked her if she wanted to continue the project. The idea for this new development project – the result of a partnership between Pollinaria and The Arts Catalyst – was to create two communication environments: one is a space- analogue or reproduction of the lunar surface, in a barn that is located here, with webcam, control panels and other equipment connected to circuits where the geese go to peck the food or drink water, the other one is a sort of control room, like Cape Canaveral – now installed in Liverpool and Newcastle – where you can see what the ducks are doing and interact with them. In fact the geese interact with visitors of the exhibition because they can send messages by tapping their bowls with their beaks, or biting the dandelion, which is their favourite plant.
For this year there is already a project?
There is a new project proposed by an artist who I met in Nevada. His name is Fritz Haeg, and it is a kind of return to the themes of agriculture and crafts, something more distant from science fiction. In November last year we started thinking about what to do and the attention has gradually focused on some research that Fritz started in Italy. Basically he wants to study people domestic habits, even the most mundane – as they prepare the table or make the coffee, how to cut a loaf of bread – to create a kind of recipe or instructions, for anyone. That sounds very simple, yet is based on some Buckminster Fuller’s revolutionary theories, in particular on the concept of integrity pattern. Fuller argues that all animated species, the human being par excellence, have their own integrity. Even if within seven years we change all the cells of our body, so we are materially different, we keep our own identity that stays until we die. Fuller argues that this feature can be recognized not only in living things but also in things we create. The question is to understand what things possess it and which not. This project is very difficult to achieve especially because it has no precise boundaries.
Can you explain your role in relation to these artists?
At first, I speak about the first two or three occasions, these artists believed that Pollinaria was the classic artist residence, a place where, even if there is a curator, you go, create, make a show and go away. I wanted to do something different. The choice of these artists is linked to a kind of final vision of Pollinaria linking research in the arts, agriculture and environment. For me, therefore, it is as if they were all commissioned projects. I realize that this could be perceived as an intrusion against the artist’s thought, but I increasingly asked artist to think about something compatible with our mission. For me it is not only a haven for artists, but to work together with them. Who comes here should feel part of a larger project, part of a path. I can not claim to be a curator, my role is really manifold.
In all this do you have some forms of state or regional funding?
So far Pollinaria has always self-financed. Clearly this is also a limitation because it has a limited budget and, if you grow, you wil necessarily need external financing. Any attempt to access these ones has so far been linked to a clear perception of losing a fundamental independence that I would rather keep. I prefer to do low-budget things, but independently.
The art project has no other forms of financing? Is there is any chance to earn something from these artistic operations and then invest it in new projects?
The direct gains from art events have been sporadic, like, still only on paper, the percentage on the sale of the HeHe’s book, or the fee for attending the conference in Nevada. I thought about other forms of financing, for example, through the sale of different types of projects documentation (photo, video). But these things must be seen carefully for each case, you must make arrangements with the artist … it’s pretty complicated. Sure, it would be much easier to access to statal funding. For example, the future geese house, something potentially very expensive, could be achieved more easily through an agricultural financing, rather than an artistic one.
Is it easier to obtain funding for farmers than for artists?
efinitely. For the farmhouse restoration, I could not ask funds for artists residence but for agritourism, because that one is an existing entry, clear. Then, as a farm we receive three categories of contributions: the contributions of standard CAP, Common Agricultural Policy, based on complicated criteria, contributions for organic farming and, later, for forested land.
While we were here you talk about the strange practice of scanning the nature, are they part of the projects relates to Pollinaria?
This is another chapter and section of the site where it is called Habitat. Since 2006 I have been working with an English designer and sculptor who follows the entire Pollinaria visual identity, from art projects to the agricultural products packaging. Among other things, he is pursuing a personal project consisting in scanning the landscape. We did a lot of scanning sessions and every time is very long because he likes to work with very low-tech tools. He uses to work with an old flatbed scanner, at least ten years old, connected to some batteries. We have to go in couple, at night, preparing the place to keep out wild boars and other wild animals, and then do the scan. Imagine, in the most remote in the dark, he stays there with the scanner, motionless, with sweat dripping, and when he is ready says: “Scanning”. In the night you only see this light and you hear the sound of the trolley scanner that limps.
You have just told how the project Pollinaria came out, however, when did you realize that this was the real path you wanted to walk?
I remember the exact day. At the time I was studying in Rome and I had not been here for a long time. I spent a whole day going around in the ditch, along the paths and fields, making a kind of mapping. Then I knew it would be great, and infinite, and I would never be bored, but rather it would have been more and more an ongoing challenge.
What do you do when you need inspiration?
Now I have this standard time of 35 minutes to move from Pescara to Pollinaria and I use it to think. They are usually repetitive thoughts, in the sense that I repeat an idea in mind several times until it becomes more and more detailed, so I use these 35 minutes to clear my mind. Sometimes it happens that when I have to meet people, and I have not even finished the thought, I stop at the bar and only after I completed my thought, “cling”, I go in. Sometimes, I do a whole program of thought: I think to this going and I think to that coming back. Apart from these moments, when thoughts are very repetitive and fundamentally linked to the job, the best time to find inspiration is in the morning when I awake, I thought the crowd in the head and, at some point, I do order and ideas arrive.
Let’s get on with the highly awaited “dariabignardi” questions: do you have favourite websites?
They are generally informative websites. One I look at often is Agricoltura24. Then, as for me, Internet is just work and there is nothing funny, when I have a moment of relaxation at the computer I listen to music. I forgot to say but for me, music has been instrumental in the transition period in which I had to make the choice that has led me to undertake this project. There is a music in particular that has stayed with me during those years.
Which was this music?
Those were the years between the end of 2000 and ’90 and I was keen on electronic music. The band that influenced me most is Boards of Canada: it was exactly the score of the world I wanted to live .
Now, however, what are you listening to?
I really like the label Raster-Noton by Alva Noto . I like Animal Collective , the solo project of Panda Bear , I use to visit often Bleep, where every week I can listen to preview of some thirty discs.
Do you read or buy magazines?
I’m going to eliminate them at all. I subscribed to a collapse of magazines, that however, no longer seem so to be so fundamental. I like Frieze , a magazine of contemporary English art, for music The Wire . I decided to delete all the subscriptions because I have less time and because it is an idiot habit to browse so high volumes, consisting mainly of advertising.
Absolute favorites books and those that you now have on the bedside table?
I have three books on the bedside table and all by Buckminster Fuller: Synergetics , ’75, Synergetics 2 , ’79 – the subtitle is Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking – Ideas and Integrities , all related to the ongoing Haeg project. The book, however, that perhaps struck me most on a personal level is The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.
Do you watch TV?
TV is an object switched off in the living room where I connect the computer to see things. When I arrive at 8.30 pm, after a day of thought, the only thing I want is a kind of prominence that empties my brain. The only things I see on television, aside from occasionally movies, but they bother me as too demanding, are the American teen-drama, like Beverly Hills 90210: if characters exceed 17 years old I’m not interested. The more intellectual one that I have seen lately is the English, Skins. This is the program: dinner, two episodes of Skins and then sleep. It’s a kind of panacea, totally therapeutic, relaxing most of the extract of lemon balm. Among the other series that I saw I really liked Pan Am , Mad Man style, however, more gossip.
Cinema?
I do not go a lot because I do not like the Italian dubbing. The last one I liked is This must be the place by Sorrentino. If, then, I have to say the cinematic equivalent of Boards of Canada, I would tell 2001 A Space Odyssey.
City where you would live?
I’m seriously considering the idea of going to live in Loreto Aprutino. If, however, I must speak on a planetary scale, I would say Reykjavik as the dimension of life and the beauty of nature.
What are the qualities required to do your job?
I think only the desire to identify work with life, with all the difficulties that this choice entails.
A quality that you would like to have, that you miss, and that you would like to cultivate?
There are many: on one hand I would like to have a greater pragmatism, thinking more in terms of organization business, and on the other I would like to have a more technical-scientific knowledge of nature that can be spent in this field. I’d like to get in 10 square meters of land and recognize all the plants that are there.
What would you like to find in your future?
So many things: I would like that all fields of this activity, artistic, agricultural, environmental, could integrate more and more, but now I see more separations. I wish there was some kind of spin that they mingled together. I would like to see where all of this will go. I do not have a clear horizon, but perhaps I really like this thing.
Instead, a concern?
I’m pretty anxious, but one thing scares me especially: to lose my memory. There are things in my life, like bad memories, things that maybe I would not have done, that I want to delete, and from that point of view it might be a good thing, on the other it is something that makes me really scared, waking up one day remembering nothing.
Last question: name people who consider funny, creative and warrior.
One person who certainly has these characteristics is an agronomist named Donato Silveri. He lives in Sulmona and is the person who most of all has so far studied and tried to enhance agricultural biodiversity Abruzzo. I’m collaborating with him for many things including the creation of an orchard and a conservation of native cereal. Staying in agriculture, I would advise you to know Eugenia Cerasoli, a young agronomist expert on organic farming and everything concerning the world of olive (olive is also an expert pruner). Tullio De Felicibus, beekeeper and president of AIAB – Italian Association Organic Farming – Abruzzo. He has a fantastic home where everything smells of honey, a real pollinator bomb in the center of Montesilvano. In art, many of them have already been interviewed or nominated, including Miccetta , Claudia Ferri, Matteo Fato … By the way, with some of them we are thinking of creating a kind of apartment block of artists in Pescara, in animprobable block on the Tiburtina street, where Matteo has currently his atelier, and where took their studios two other very talented artists, Paride Petrei and Lorenzo Aceto. We are planning to promote this project by inviting other ones to participate. Then I would add Andrea Straccini , Giorgio Liddo , Daniela d’Arielli, and Emanuela Barbi. In addition to artists and photographers I would put in the list even people with a high rate of GCC that deal with art – curators, writers, critics – like Marco Antonini, that was born in Pescara but works in Brooklyn where he runs a gallery called Nurtureart, Francesca Referza and Veronica Valentini, curators currently working outside the Abruzzo region and / or nation, Simone Ciglia and Giorgio D’Orazio, young critics and curators instead based in Pescara and Rome. Finally I would recommend you to interview Hela, dealing creatively with flowers and economy of culture and my brother Berardo: he could tell the entire history of the occupation of the Teatro Valle and the vicissitudes of his films Shooting Silvio and Vola Vola.
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LINKS: www.pollinaria.org
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