Culture never isolates
inglese/ la cultura non isola
An island is that part of land that rises from the depths; separated and shielded from the sea, insulated from the continents whose vast motionless lands are swept by the manipulative corruption of the countless events and shifts that serve only to age and deteriorate.
Islands are a form of liquid confinement. Open to resettlement and renovation, they stand as a world within the world, governed by their own rules and regulations, much like Atlantis, Utopia or the isle of Robinson Crusoe.
How many islands and how many utopias rise and sink over time? The philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote: "What is an island? There is no world, there are only islands". In our minds the very notion of island therefore becomes a reduction and a metaphor, a project and a revolt against the world we dwell in and experience on a daily basis.
As such, the island is a place and a model whose physical features are not only geographical or natural, but also the expression of man’s artifice and culture. A place of exploration, experimentation, and knowledge, the island is an inspiration for contemporary cultures. Firmly rooted in its own existence, it partakes in processes of identity construction and deconstruction, abandonment and distancing, loss and bonding: as a bearer of both separation and confinement, the island fosters dawnings and rebirths, rediscoveries and regenerations, the old and the new. As the epitomic elsewhere, the island hides its treasures and offers a safe haven to all those in pursuit of happiness.
Silhouetted against the horizon, the island mirrors our very being, embodying both fears and aspirations. Michel Tournier compares the island to the diastolic and systolic beating of the human heart as it rhythmically alternates dilation and contraction. It is the magic circle that enfolds and protects. A safe, self-sufficient space like the cosmic egg or the Garden of Eden. A nucleus at the heart of an amniotic sea, the island is maternity enshrined, a “return to the womb” where feminine/maternal culture becomes cultural generativity, the bearer of a particular attitude towards humankind. Hospitality, compassion, protection, care, generosity, and bonding are the essential conditions of the culture of difference that we intend to promote through our cultural programme.
The island is also a mental space where thoughts crystallize as they rise up from dark, impenetrable depths, steeped in life-force. “Islands are like ideas. Deserted, fascinating. Like reservoirs they have captured stories and sheltered humankind since the creation of the very first poem” (Maylis de Kerangal).
Though it represents an image, a symbol, an idea, the island is a concrete and carnal place, dominated by the ebb and flow of its relationships, by the crossroads of comings and goings: «Departures and arrivals. The island makes its own way across the surrounding sea, to touch other lands” (Jean-Luc Nancy). By definition, the island is permeable, open.
Studying the complexity of the island's underlying imaginary means bringing the mythical and archaic roots of every rational construction to the light, while projecting onto an image-place all those elements in need of re-elaboration and rejection: confinement, entrapment, and harrowing mystery.
The island is a realm of doubles: opening/ closing, greeting/excluding, freedom/ confinement, bonds/distances. This duality in terms of identity will characterize the founding principles and the cultural programme of Procida Italian Capital of Culture 2021. We embrace the privileged perspective that the island generously offers to experience the endless contradictions and eternal battle between the sense of belonging and the need to stand apart.
The experiences that emerge from within the island and that accompany and guide the application procedure, all develop a point-by-point mapping of facts and events, where no imaginary and fictional place acquires true concreteness, but all allow themselves to be identified and discovered. Laboratories burgeon across the island and daily life, natural elements, and the cultural expressiveness of the local culture become the tools that promote an ever-evolving human project.
The projects explore the island on two separate levels. On an initial horizontal level, they describe the creative surface of the island as it effectively appears, with its cycle of dynamic and cultural manifestations. This itinerary, however, also presents a vertical depth seen as an authentic journey, or a miniature of humankind’s contemporary potential, where the ideas of progress, science and technology place humanity at the centre of its own memory and, consequently, of its own ability to plan for the future by developing the awareness of being inhabitants and not mere passers-by.
