Castel del Monte represents not only an example of the great architecture of the past, but rather due to its singularity it seems to be able to increasingly become the meeting place between different cultures, says Achille Bonito Oliva .
It is with this in mind that the Polo Museale della Puglia , together with Impresa Leopizzi 1750 and in collaboration with the concessionaire NovaApulia, presents the great exhibition of the Egyptian artist Moataz Nasr (Alexandria, Egypt, 1961) invited to dialogue with the spaces of the most fascinating and mysterious Frederick's castle.
With the curatorship of Achille Bonito Oliva , site specific works and new productions give life to the project entitled "The Barzakh / Lo spazio liminale" from June to November 2019.
The liminal space, from the Latin root limen = threshold, is the concept that indicates the crossing of a space of transition that generates transformation , metamorphosis up to a new consciousness and identity. Reported to Castel del Monte, he defines this particular architectural space as the threshold between two different worlds, the Western and the Eastern, which merge in the evident exchange of knowledge, quotation and contamination.
The artist has long documented and questioned the philosophy that may have inspired the construction of the castle. “Crossing it asked me more questions than answers - he said - so I decided to let the building speak to me. Already in the inner courtyard, which is the heart of the castle, surrounded by the stone that delimits the vision of the sky, I perceived the sensation of a threshold that divided two worlds. It is the concept of liminal space, also central to the Sufi culture which calls it Barzakh . Could this have been the inspiration? Could Castel del Monte have been conceived as a space of transformation and metamorphosis? ”.
The artist has thus focused attention on the articulation of spaces, observing the sequence of windows, stairs, vaults. The celebration of detail becomes Moataz Nasr 's creative strategy who proposes new forms in a series of wood carvings and inlays of mother-of-pearl and shells designed for the first floor of the castle. While in the large octagonal void of the central atrium, the artist pays homage to the cultural relationship between religions through the Minaret sculpture which recalls in its abstraction the spirituality of its origin, in the form of a wood and glass minaret.
The magnificence of the exterior is celebrated by the work Maze , a path of meadow, created on the geometry of words of the ancient Kufic character that carries within it an extremely topical message: “No religion in politics and politics in religion”.
Moataz Nasr, an internationally renowned artist, in his multimedia and interdisciplinary work and the encroachment of languages creates a happy short circuit between cultures and civilizations. The entire exhibition is an initiatory journey that leads from the outside to the inside, in a relationship of scale with architecture and history, nature and memory that celebrates the coexistence of differences.