Castello di Ama

TANA (notes on the poetics of the project)

Some time has passed since the first meeting with Ama. I have returned several times. Seasons have passed, the temperature has changed and so did the colors of the landscape. I saw this place transform and I tried to understand it by living it, crossing it, giving it the time necessary for it to manifest itself.

I explored the surroundings on foot, observed Ama from the rows of her vineyards, between the stone walls, and then from afar from the surrounding hills. It was as if I was trying to grasp its soul, as I had been told to feel Ama as a living organism. I understood the care of the landscape, like the design of the lines of its vineyards: integrating human intervention in a natural context and therefore achieving a synthesis, translating it into wine to assimilate this place in an intense sip.

It took this time before we were able to conceive a project. Perhaps even a forced stop, a long pause that partly supported this slowness and which more clearly defined the nature of the mark to be left. Time for slow maturation. An impossible time for the frenetic and driven rhythms to which we have become accustomed.

I would like the project to be able to condense what Ama represents, her intrinsic, immutable character.

We have identified a place that is still intact. A liminal space outside the village and contemporary set between border lines between the small road that leads to Casanova, the old aqueduct and the new rows of vineyards on the eastern side. The intent is to intervene in the territory with an approach similar to that of working the land following the natural lines, profiles and slopes of the land. In a relationship with it that is not parasitic but symbiotic.

The first images I had collected were satellite views of the Ama territory. It was as if we were looking at it from the perspective of the sky, as if we were fragments that were about to fall onto it due to gravity. A shower of shooting stars.

There has always been this vertical dimension to accompany my experience of this place. An indissoluble relationship between heaven and earth, in the growth of plants from the ground, in the fall of rain, in the maturation brought by the sun, gravity, the soil that absorbs, rejects, releases, and resurfaces. The result of this vertical exchange is treated in the fruits of the vineyards and olive trees.

In this continuous dialogue between the sky and the earth, the intervention ideally wants to increase the distances in an exchange relationship that from rain to soil extends from the celestial vault to the bowels of the subsoil. This project is the latest attempt to evoke this intrinsic relationship between two opposites in a cozy and intimate space. As if in this profound place we could project the universe.

The soil of the vineyards is rich in limestone, you can feel its echo in the wine. Often, walking through the landslides where excavators have passed - moving volumes of earth to plant new vineyards - granules of gypsum and quartzite emerge which shine, refracting the sun as if they were fallen stars.

I thought of the den as a return to our wildest and most animalistic dimension, ideally digging it into the ground and accessing it through tortuous passages. Drawing the plan of this environment as a viscera, an organ housed almost anatomically in Ama's soil, one of her livers.

From an oculus that almost recalls the ancient omphalos sunlight shines to risk the environment. Imaginative projection of the celestial vault onto the floor.

Set in the ceiling are a group of opalescent quartz and calcite arranged in a constellation.

The den, with its liver shape, takes us back to the divinatory art of the soothsayers, to the reading of time and the signs of the sky, to the propitiatory sacrifice, to the foundation rite.

It is an organ with strong symbolic power. Generated in the territory of these hills and eviscerated by them to create a void, a space of the imagination that we can inhabit.

Giorgio Andreotta Calò