Find masks and stories written by participants > HERE                   

Gaia is a community art project on interspecies storytelling, created with the local community of Stigliano, in collaboration with land artist Riccelli during Appartengo Public Art Festival 2024.

Centred around nature–human relations, the project operates at the intersection of anthropology, clay sculpting, creative writing and embodied storytelling.  




Summary_This project began with the construction of a land-art dwelling made from natural materials, structurally inspired by traditional peasant huts of Basilicata rural region. The refuge, both sculpture and shelter, is configured as a site of encounter between humans and their landscape, a place to listen and to narrate.

In Greek cosmology, Gaia emerges from Chaos, the primordial void, and gives birth to all forms of life. In our project, Gaia becomes both a metaphor and a material presence, an inclusive home and a collective organism, a common space for shared belonging.

A collective artwork and participatory ritual, most of all, Gaia is an experiment in embodied storytelling. Through creative writing and clay mask-making workshops, young inhabitants of Stigliano were invited to reconnect with ancestral gestures: touching soil, shaping identities and giving voice to the stories rooted in their community.  
The act of creating masks with clay and natural materials reactivates one of humanity’s oldest rituals: transforming the self to access something beyond the individual.
During the workshops, the mask became a threshold object, a liminal object through which participants could explore who they are, and who they might become when speaking as the Earth, as ancestors, as collective memory.
Each story performed inside the earthen installation was an act of refamiliarising with the relationship between humans, their territory and the histories of their land.

Drawing on the anthropology of craft and making (Marchand, 2008), the project approaches artistic practice as a mode of knowing. The mask operates not as an aesthetic object but as a relational “third persona” (Turner, 1969) through which participants inhabit other subjectivities and explore the porous boundaries between self and collective, human and non-human, presence and memory. 

Creative writing workshops complemented this process, engaging myth and narrative as tools for reflection and transformation. Within the performative space of the installation, these stories were rituals of encounter, bridging individual experience and shared imagination.



Methodology_participatory land art; community mask-making workshops with clay and natural materials; creative writing workshops; embodied storytelling; collective performance and archive.





References
Marchand, T. (2008). Craft, Memory, and Materiality in Anthropology. Journal of Material Culture, 13(3), 253–270.
Turner, V. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine Publishing.
Leach, E. (1976). Culture and Communication: The Logic by Which Symbols Are Connected. Cambridge University Press.
Pink, S. (2015). Doing Sensory Ethnography. 2nd Edition. Sage.

Find masks and stories written by participants > HERE