Pianura (Plain)

Pianura is a dialogue between two provincial territories, both located in the same macro-region: the Pianura Padana or Val Padana (Po Valley, the most important one in Italy). More specifically, Pianura focuses on the provinces of Udine (Friuli-Venezia Giulia) and Bergamo (Lombardia), which are the native lands of the two authors, Andrea Arduini and Daniele Pilenga.

In 1984, while announcing the publication of Narratori delle pianure (Plains’ narrators), Italo Calvino said: “After years of silence, Celati is back with a book which holds as its core the representation of the visible world. Moreover, it is an internal acceptance of the daily landscape, inside what seems to inspire the imagination the less”. The thirty short stories within the book, regarding the Po river’s Valley, are funny, imaginary, sad or terrible: they reprise the ancient narrative forms of the Italian tales tradition, the oral transmission or the “heard on the grapevine in a peculiar place or landscape”. The oral narrator is a framework much beloved by Walter Benjamin, which Cerati tried to discover by recollecting stories during his travels along the river banks. By celebrating this lost form of art through his short stories, Celati reveals a general environmental corruption which concerns not only the landscapes, but also the ability to tell and exchange experiences. By doing so, the stories also become modern-day parables, integral part in the effort to grant back some credibility to the narrative art, not only in its literary form.

Daniele Pilenga

Pianura stems from an unfinished work conducted between 2013 and 2015, an ambitious project which aimed to photograph all the villages within the Province of Udine plain area. It was a research born from a suggestion deriving from the reading of Limonov’s fictional biography by E. Carrere (Adelphi 2012). The novel showed a clear description of the Russian provincial environment, especially during the 90’s (immediately following the URSS collapse), filled with economic and human depression and confusion. A background which brought my imagination to focus on similar aspects of the environment I find myself in, the Friulian plains in the 2010’s. This served as the starting point for the actual wanderings throughout the Friulian villages. Pictures were taken pointing out their current appearance, the result of a centuries-long history: from the rural, farmer’s traditions to the development of the Twentieth Century (Second World War, industrialization, economic boom, urban drift, etc.). The subjects are mainly architectural: residential, commercial and religious buildings. Architecture is the way to record changes throughout time, showing with its forms and solutions development processes, production cycles and, not less importantly, people’s heritage, also called folklore, intended as the general perception of a community in all its classes. By doing so, we can explain many recurring motifs, from the most traditional and permanent ones, like the religious ones, to many others, sometimes very bizarre and almost Kitsch.

Andrea Arduini