The work of Edoardo Tresoldi in Bari presented

The Lombard artist presented In the ancient site of San Pietro in Bari Vecchia – symbolic place dear to the Bari community and emblem of a story with millennial roots dating back to the Bronze Age – the first portion of the environmental installation which will be 30 meters high and entirely created with metal networks. The scale model of the work, on the other hand, was presented by the sculptor in the former church of San Francesco della Scarpa, together with Maria Piccarreta, architect and regional secretary of Mic Puglia and the mayor of Bari Vito Leccese.

The work of Edoardo Tresoldi in Bari presented

Already known on the international scene for the creation, in 2016, of the reconstruction work of the early Christian basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Siponto, Edoardo Tresoldi He won the international public ban of the regional secretariat financed with European funds worth two million euros. For four years he has worked on this ambitious urban regeneration project wanted by Mic, analyzing all the archaeological studies on the area and actively confronting the local community to rediscover its symbolic value in the collective imagination. The imposing installation, in fact, is aimed at returning to the Bari, through contemporary art combined with archaeological research, a fundamental part of their identitya place for too long denied to the citizens, left in the hands of the local underworld.

The history of the archaeological site of San Pietro

The archaeological site of San Pietro, in fact, has a complex and troubled history. In the early Middle Ages, in fact, there was a place of worship, made up of the church of San Pietro dating back to the twelfth century and by the Franciscan convent built in the fifteenth century. In the seventeenth century the monumental complex was further transformed to become, in the Napoleonic era, a civil building, first a high school and then a hospital destroyed during the Second World War with the explosion of the Anderson ship. In 1969 the remains of the hospital were also demolished, generating an “urban emptiness”, an off-limits area that has become an archaeological area in the eighties.

Edoardo Tresoldi: “I started from what has been the San Pietro area in the last thousand years”

As it clarifies Maria Piccarretaenthusiastic about the work done so far: “The San Pietro area has a complex, troubled history, but in fact it is the beating heart of the city. So it is right and dutiful to work because the Bari can reapply and who live it as a place and not as a memory“. The work of Tresoldi is, therefore, a stratified work, which aims to recreate the history of the San Pietro site by recalling the different buildings of worship that have been built over the centuries.”I started from the historical and scientific research of what has been the area of ​​San Pietro in the last thousand years – explains Edoardo Tresoldi– A site that has its roots until the birth of Bari, full of stratifications. We only took a small slice of these thousand years to understand what has passed here”. “The work – concludes the artist – Try to grasp the photography of this process. It is a temporal photo in which buildings such as a matryoska fit into each other to tell the history of the city. It is a great puzzle with which we also try to answer the millennial question about the sense of the sacred that lived here”.

Cecilia Pavone