FELTROSA people – gente di FELTROSA

I have been collaborating with Eva Basile on Feltrosa since the Prato edition in 2010 it’s been a great experience so far and I am looking forward to meet you all at this year edition in Umbria, in the towns of Amelia and Porchiano del Monte.

Being Feltrosa a traveling event, the location factor is always a major one and this time, as it was for the previous edition is not going to disappoint the participants, Umbria looks a bit like Tuscany, for those that are familiar, but has its own flair in the country and the historical cities, there are more walled built up areas that give a better idea of how Italy might have been in the Middle Ages, it’s a visual repertoire of collective memory and it’s not only to see, it has to be experienced, Amelia with its steep and narrow roads, Porchiano with the towers and the main door.

This is only to give you a little taste of what you’ll find, apart from the great locals that will do their best to provide an excellent hospitality as well as the Feltrosa people. We have met some of them in Verona during Verona Tessile, an event that was also supported and sponsored among others by DHGshop.

Let’s hear the words of Susanna Piras, Lisbeth Wahl and Rosanna Bassani, the latter of the group is also teaching at FELTROSA, check her class!

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japan – house of the rising sun

Assaggiando il Giappone

Yasuko, che si pronuncia “Iasko” è la mia unica fonte di vero cibo giapponese, in Italia d’altronde i cinesi, per noi indistinguibili dai giapponesi, hanno invaso il settore della ristorazione a base di Sushi, ramen etc.
Poter quindi assaggiare e vivere l’esperienza di un pasto del sol levante in tutte le sue peculiarità, è una sorta di evento, anche perché finalmente si riesce ad aggirare il formalismo del ristorante ed ogni suo artificio: l’apparecchiatura finto minimal chic, l’onnipresenza del bambù, allusioni al tatami in ogni angolo, scritte in caratteri hiragana, katakana, kanji o romanji, probabilmente senza alcun significato.

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un peu d’histoire

Paris – un peu d’histoire <<< click here to listen to the audio – clicca qui per sentire l’audio

Il suono di una voce che cresce, quella di mio figlio e la rassicurante tranquillità di una nonna, mia madre, che guida il nipote nell’apprendimento della lingua francese, pur se distante ho sentito quei suoni famigliari come un’occasione imperdibile, da documentare, registrare, filmare e fotografare.

E’ un segno, quello della trasmissione del sapere, di un futuro migliore, mio figlio impara il francese e l’inglese a scuola, con l’evidente intento di creare un’Europa più Europa e dei cittadini europei che possano condividere gli stessi valori, gli stessi principi e perché no, anche gli stessi riferimenti culturali.

Dedicato ad Anna Levi

(English version below)

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una “nube” in feltro

Questa volta in italiano, la mia lingua madre, perché uno dei miei “dodici lettori” si lamenta sempre che scrivo in inglese e stavolta voglio sorprendere.

Lo scenario è sempre lo stesso, Umbria, Amelia, provincia di Terni, ormai un luogo dell’anima ed eccellente location per la prossima edizione di Feltrosa 2013, non solo per la qualità urbanistico-paesaggistica, ma soprattutto perché i posti del cuore sono popolati da persone che il cuore almeno te lo sfiorano e basta poco, davvero poco, per passare oltre, bastano gli occhi.

Nube Sandoval ha un nome che sembra uscire dalle pagine di Hugo Pratt ed allora te la immagini, capelli al vento a scrutare da una scogliera l’orizzonte marino a fianco di Corto Maltese, la puoi pensare come un nervoso e complesso personaggio uscito dalla matita di Sergio Toppi, come un indio alla ricerca del proprio tesoro, precipitato dal cielo con un velivolo pilotato da un gringo, altrimenti la puoi pensare come un’eroina “bonelliana”, mentre fa perdere la testa a Dylan Dog e ride alle improbabili battute di Groucho Marx.

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… at least do them well …

“If you want to do graffiti on walls, then at least do them well …”

I have been here before, the first time I saw this place I thought it wasn’t real, it could not be real, the location, in the middle of the countryside, the complexity of the plan that featured three swimming pools, two slides, two trampolines, a bar, a pizza place, a restaurant and two discos.

What happened to those that used to work here? Was it a popular place? Youtube features a rather dark video shot in 1993 while a rather obscure DJ Ringo is setting up the night at the Tartana disco and probably doing a sort of sound check, a second clip is also available shot around midnight and the customers have already started dancing.

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back to umbria – FELTROSA 2013

I am a person of habit, I go back to places I like, I tend to repeat those patterns that produce an inner sense of peace and ease.

In this thread I may place my regular trips to Umbria: Lago Trasimeno, Perugia, Clitunno’s Springs, Porchiano del Monte, Amelia.

Umbria is a reasuring experience for someone that was born and raised in Tuscany, hence the environment does not differ from the one that has imprinted my childhood, yet is different in proportions and use.
Tuscany has definitely more vineyards, while Umbria has a higher density of olive trees, or at least this is my superficial perception.

Umbria and to be more specific, Porchiano del Monte and Amelia, are the venues for this year’s edition of FELTROSA, the yearly meeting of Italian feltmakers, open to anyone that has little to no experience in feltmaking, the meeting offers a wide range of workshops to choose from.

Along with the lectures and demonstrations this year there will be two different exhibitions, the first and most challenging was open to any artist that could produce an art piece that had to confront with the walls of the small Medieval town. This last saturday the 16th of March 2013 the jury met in Porchiano to choose 5 pieces out of 30 projects.
Caridad Isabel Barragan, visual artist, Lorenzo Mango, university professor, and Cielo Pessione, artist and performer, had to pick the 5 finalists.

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no one’s here any longer

March’s moody weather can’t hold me back from scouting for stories, old ones, fragments that can be connected like dots in order to recompose a comprehensible picture.

No need to say my tool is photography as a mean of visual annotation a vector that carries what I see to others.

Places such as the one that I have visited today are a common scenario in Italy, there are many properties that are left uninhabited for various reasons, we can try to imagine a list of hypothesis:

1- the place is inhospitable for today’s standards
2- a dispute among the heirs that was left unsolved over the decades resulting in a property that has not been split into smaller portions
3- convenience in keeping the house empty in order to use it as a guarantee fund for the banks
4- cost of maintenance not justified by the decrease of population and jobs in rural areas

Whatever the reason may be, I always find the attempt of trying to imagine the abandoned building at its activity peak, very interesting, thingking of when kids ran through the stables or up the stairs or stared at the women preparing food in the kitchen.

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we are on line

dhgshop.com You can find #wool and #felt for handcrafting vine.co/v/bH031punErL

— DHGShop (@DHGShop) March 7, 2013

We have tried this new system for promoting our activity through the various social networks.
Storytelling in only 7 seconds! Check the VINE link

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chin up and nose in the air

Is there a reason why we should always look at our eye level? by repeating the same patterns we won’t be able to develop a different point of view, nontheless we hardly see people looking up in our towns at least in my middle class neighbourhood, where everyone seems so busy minding each one’s private business.

We wear hats that block our vision towards the sky, our personal blinkers, so we are not distracted by the unexpected and where the attention of men decrease there is where the unpredictable happens, that’s where we as humanity, lose contron on our own creations, our cities. Looking from the ground up we catch perspectives that not even the most carefull of architects was able to forsee and sketch, pictures that look up at the gutters can easily gather one of those unseen images so rare nowadays, where everything is pictured in an istant.

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there was life

Once a gallerist labeled my work as “ruin photography” a peculiar definition that found me completely unprepared, I did not know what to answer, it seemed reductive to receive a label in a matter of seconds by someone I barely knew, but apparently that’s how the art world goes.
I have to admit I appreciate the exhistance of mankind more by its absence than by its polluting presence.
The ruins of any kind, may it be an abandoned mine, an ancient castle, they all stand still reminding us that the world would eventually move on even without us and such desertion does not have to take place after a dramatic event such a nuclear disaster or an earthquake, we, as a specie, will probably leave this place in total unconcern from the other forms of life we are sharing this planet with.

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