L’AQUILA – From 4 June to 28 August 2024 the headquarters of the Representation of the Abruzzo Region in Brussels will host the Personal exhibition “Rapsodikòs” of the artist Mara Di Giammatteo.
The exhibition consists of a series of contemporary art works and installations, created through the ancient art of weaving and embroidery. The artist wanted to create a tribute to the compositions of the poet Pretarola Ginevra Bartolomei (1909-2007), a figure who, thanks to his oral and written testimonies, has made it possible to maintain memories of the ancient language of Pietracamela (TE), object of study by experts and linguists, not only Italian but also European, in recent eighty years.
The artist’s conceptual intuition moves from the analysis of the texts collected in the volume “The “worthy” language. Pietracamela and the pretarolo in Ginevra Bartolomei’s texts. Linguistic profile, reading standards, poetic anthology (published by Mnamon www.mnamon.it/la-lingua-degna/), work edited by Giovanni Agresti (dir.), Silvia Pallini And Graziano Mirichigninephew of the poet and custodian of her manuscripts and video and audio testimonies, who conducted careful work of collecting, transcribing and translating over one hundred compositions by Ginevra Bartolomei, as well as having proposed a system of phonetic transcription rules and provided a broad and detailed historical and linguistic framework of the pretarolo.
The “Rapsodikòs” exhibition is linked to the aforementioned work and draws inspiration from Ginevra Bartolomei’s poetry and voice, condensing in the materiality of the weaving the profound meaning of some chosen words, which are revealed on the canvas, created by hand according to tradition, to pass on rhapsodically the historical, anthropological and identity value of the Pretarola language. In this sense, Mara Di Giammatteo’s work represents, like other rare significant initiatives, an attempt to rescue the Pretarola dialect from the danger of oblivion and to make it known even outside the small local reality, as well as the poems of Ginevra Bartolomei, identifying elements of the community of Pietracamela, one of the most beautiful villages in Italy, set in the Gran Sasso d’Italia massif (1005 meters above sea level) and characterized by very notable cultural emergencies.
On 4 June, with the High Patronage of the Abruzzo Region, the inauguration event of the “Rapsodikòs” exhibition will be held, preceded by a round table which will see the institutional greetings of the Abruzzo Region, of the Mayor of Pietracamela, Dr. Antonio Villani, the presentation of the book The tongue “worthy. Pietracamela and the pretarolo in Ginevra Bartolomei’s texts” edited by Silvia Pallini And Graziano Mirichigni and the intervention “The fragility of memory” art critic and curator of the exhibition Maria Chiara Wang.
The event will end with the musical performance “SONGLINES Poetry”edited by Exit_lab (Pat Lugo and Marco Loprieno) and with an aperitif by theAbrussels Cultural Association.
The exhibition can be visited at the premises of the Abruzzo Region in Brussels, in Avenue Louise 210, until 28 August, every day from Monday to Thursday from 9.30 to 18.30 and Fridays from 9.30 to 12.30.
The event, sponsored by the Municipality of Pietracamela, by the Gran Sasso d’Italia Chamber of Commerce and promoted by the LEM-Italia Association, is also part of the range of initiatives of theYear of Italian Roots in the World established by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation with the aim of valorising the stories of emigration, sacrifice and success of the ancestors of Italian descendants in the world and preserving their memory. It does so by paying homage to the Pretarolo dialect, extremely distinctive compared to the koinè dialect of Abruzzo, and the compositions of an author, Ginevra Bartolomei (1909-2007), who accompanied the story of an entire community in verse (in Italian and in Pretarolo). of the mountains, captured in some fundamental historical junctures: the migratory story (to Canada, in particular), the transformation of the mountains for tourist use, the depopulation and spiritual desertification of the country, the “heroic” construction of road infrastructures. Today Gina’s manuscripts, as she was known within the local community, are edited and framed by a substantial sociolinguistic and dialectological introduction and by a rich array of notes and indexes (the dense index of names – toponyms and anthroponyms), as well as from various multimedia supports (scanable QR-codes which give access to numerous audiovisual contents) and from artistic tapestries that make the word pretarola visual, material and alive.
