In the village, people say that in the past, the most frequently-heard sound in the centre’s narrow streets was the slow clopping of mule hooves. Long days, weeks and months of travel were needed to transport life from one city to another, exchanging valuable merchandise on the intricate paths of the salt routes, constructing what has now become the cultural heritage of the Four Provinces.
La Camminata dei Corpi Salienti (The Walk of Significant Bodies) by artist Beatrice Celli retraces some of the important locations on these ancient Ways, highlighting the interconnections between different cultures and populations, generating a new territorial geography.
Within the densely-built structure of San Sebastiano Curone, Celli has placed three glass lamps with disturbing anatomical features, eccentric alchemical alembics that – activated on the day of inauguration and filled with salt crystals – shed light onto ancient stories, trade relations and fleeting visits that traversed the area and have reached us today in a rarefied form, sparsely distributed along the streets like a legend.
For the inauguration, the residents are invited to take part in a walk led by two mules with jute sacks filled with salt. This substance, with its alchemical properties and the delicate biochemical balance that it creates in our bodies, purifies distant times from the most obscure forms of energy, and puts the past into communication with the village’s present. The notes of pipes and whistles, that accompanied muleteers during their journeys, echo along the familiar routes.
Even the tools for manual labour, typical of these lands, preserved in the Piero Leddi archive, freed from the weight of their original function and inebriated by a new vitality in contact with bodies, are transformed into jewels to be worn, re-establishing a primordial link. In La Camminata dei Corpi Salienti, the artist thus creates a collective testimony, a spell cast on the locations that, re-enchanted, reveal the never-ending existence of combinations and analogies between the elements, giving rise to new tales and new paths.