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Cartogram: Crisa dialogues with Maria Lai
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Cartogram: Crisa dialogues with Maria Lai

From 16 March to 16 July 2024

Musma - Museum of Contemporary Sculpture Matera

Musma - Museum of Contemporary Sculpture Matera

Via San Giacomo, Matera

Closed now: open at 10:00

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The MUSMA ( Museum of Contemporary Sculpture of Matera ) continues to expand its collection by welcoming new donations. During 2024 the museum will rotate works already in the collection, making them dialogue with new works, both permanent and temporary, designed specifically for the museum spaces. The exhibition aims to make the language of contemporary sculpture more readable and highlight the links and relationships between the artists. Thanks to the fruitful relationship with the Institute of Conservation and Restoration based in Matera which contributes to the conservation and restoration of many works in the collection, through some case studies it has opened up new possibilities for debate in the context of contemporary restoration.

The first appointment is March 16th at 6pm with " Cartogramma ", the new permanent installation by Crisa in dialogue with the three works by the Sardinian artist Maria Lai, already present in the Museum's collection.


The works are: “ Cuore mio 2002 ”, “ La torre, 1971-2002 ” and “ Sa domu de su dolu, 2002 ”. “ The Tower ” attests to Maria's great ability to recreate reality; to rewrite the memory of an object by offering it another dimension. The work consists of the assembly of two groups of overlapping wooden frames, painted black and white, weaves, knots of painted twine. This description highlights that the lower part of the work, the white part, is actually the 1971 Country Loom that Maria rethinks and reuses to create the work commemorating the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 on the Twin Towers in New York and that dates back to 2002. Cuore mio and Sa domu de su dolu , tell us about another Maria, the one who transforms the words written in the stories of Cambosu, her professor, who teaches Maria the rhythm and breath of words into works silent. The threads, the loaves, the three works of the " little goat anxious for precipices " will enter into dialogue with the work of the Cagliari-born muralist Crisa who, in 2019, on the occasion of the centenary of the artist's birth, commissioned by his family, a graphic intervention was created on the facade of Maria's studio in Cadeddu.

In the MUSMA room, new "GEOGRAPHIES" will be born just like Maria did when she said about them: " I am looking for cosmic spaces, skies, very distant yet tactile spaces. The spaces I seek are not so much on a surface, but beyond it...The astral maps responded to the need for a relationship with the infinite, for an expansion and projection onto the distance...They are an invitation to travel. ”The work that Crisa (stage name of Federico Carta) will create for MUSMA, CARTOGRAMMA, this is its title, will be an invitation to go further: “An imaginary geography composed of sections or fragments of the world that will tell a territory with its landscape and its urban change and depopulation. His key to understanding accompanies Matera to reflect itself in this vision. Painted and engraved ceramic sculptural inserts will be superimposed on the painting; real focuses on the memory of humanity. A relic of memories that have come to define us, these concepts are migratory flows, changes, settlements and displacement.” In parts of its geography, the Sassi, firm and stable, are the guardians of the historical time of this scenario, the reeds in the wind, a symbol of freedom that grow spontaneously in the peripheral areas. Threads connect humans to the landscape. Crisa, like a seismograph, sensitively captures the terrain and tries to trace the world.

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Via San Giacomo, Matera, Italy

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Opening hours

opens - closes last entry
monday 10:00 - 20:00
tuesday 10:00 - 20:00
wednesday 10:00 - 20:00
thursday 10:00 - 20:00
friday 10:00 - 20:00
saturday 10:00 - 20:00
sunday 10:00 - 20:00

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