During the months of the first lockdown (March / June 2020) MUSMA invited the artists of its collections to take a shot of their studio, a room in their apartment and / or an object in it that could represent that particular moment. Twenty artists involved: Saverio Todaro, Jasmine Pignatelli, Valerio Rocco Orlando, Sandra Hauser, Leonardo Sonnoli, Agnese Purgatorio, Roberto Paci Dalò, Emmanuele De Ruvo, Afterall, Alberto Timossi, Audrey Coianiz, Saul Saguatti, Francesco Arena, Luca Centola, Davide Sebastian, Giovanni Gaggia, Matteo Basilè, Aurelio Amendola, The moon on a leash, Andrea Felli.

Thus was born the DiStanze project, an exhibition of eighteen photographs, an installation and a sound work, set up in the Graphic Room of the MUSMA on September 16, 2021. Twenty very different perspectives, of surprising impact, on the months of isolation forced by the pandemic .

More than two years after the start of the pandemic, the twenty artists have been invited to once again inhabit the hypogea, the courtyards and the rooms of the MUSMA: and twenty , meetings and dialogues on art in which the return to being is celebrated together.

On Saturday 9 April at 18:00 the series of " close encounters with the artists " will be inaugurated with the presentation of the volume Portami al Confine by Valerio Rocco Orlando , a narrative that reconstructs the path of creation of the work created in 2016, in occasion of the ten years of MUSMA. Portami al Confine is a request that Orlando made publicly to the community of Matera and which took the form of a video installation, or as Orlando himself defined it as a "social sculpture [...] a collective portrait starting from points of view individuals ”, which became part of the permanent collection of MUSMA and exhibited in room 7 of Palazzo Pomarici.

The artist will talk with the writer Tiziano Scarpa , winner of the 2009 Strega Prize and the 2009 SuperMondello Prize for the novel Stabat Mater and author of the critical text Talking heads renew the landscape accompanying Take me to the Border .

Relationship and community, understood not only as formal concepts but as a concrete synthesis of various particular subjectivities, are an essential component of the entire work of Valerio Rocco Orlando who has established a special relationship with Matera and its community. But as Orlando himself states: "By community I do not mean only the citizens of Matera, but a specific community of practice made up of the people who have gathered around this project with a common goal, namely the analysis of the theme of hospitality and question of individual responsibility in the process of identifying solutions for the community. In this sense, the formal synthesis of Portami al Confine is not to be understood as a deadline or a point of arrival, but as the fruit of time, the result of the collaborations triggered so far and the source of an ongoing research, aimed at the constitution of a permanent training workshop. "

Precisely this ongoing research, carried out with passion in the urban fabric of Matera and among the folds of the imaginary of its community, has generated South of Imagination , a project by Valerio Rocco Orlando aimed at the creation and a new school of the arts in Matera, realized thanks to the support of the General Direction for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture as part of the Italian Council program (2020).