La via dell’acqua (The Waterway) – from project to work

Critique sheet

Eleven artists, eleven visions, one big breath: that of the mountain.

The exhibition presents a collection of maquettes, sketches, photographic simulations, and scale models of the projects that will be installed in the new site-specific works in Vallicciola, as part of the ‘Acquamontana’ project of the CEAS Tempio and the Organica Museum. The project, launched in March 2024, has seen the realisation of various activities such as workshops, concerts and conferences dedicated to the valorisation of the network of Monte Limbara springs known as ‘la via dell’acqua’ (the water route), an evocative 30-kilometre route that reaches the countless springs that dot the slopes of the massif in the heart of Gallura. Now in its final stages, the project will be inaugurated in September 2025. In a journey through the drawings, notes, photographs and sketches of the 11 artists, the exhibition restores the vision that precedes the realisation of a work.

The eleven unseen works will be installed along a route of about 15 kilometres through the woods, rocks, waters and silences of the Limbara massif. Each work will stand near a water feature – forgotten fountains, hidden streams, pools, ponds – and will constitute a stopping and listening point. It is the first concrete step of a broader path, a preview that allows us to enter the creative process of the artists involved and their way of reading, inhabiting and transforming the landscape. It is also an opportunity to question ourselves on the profound meaning of making art today, at a time when our relationship with nature appears fragile, fragmented and often compromised.

The ‘Acquamontana’ project stems from a shared urgency: that of mending the bond with the environment through a non-invasive poetic language. Water, the central theme of the project, is here understood not only as a resource or subject, but as a living, symbolic, generative presence. Water connects, transforms, preserves: it is liquid time, changing geography, flowing memory. Each artist has worked from this awareness, elaborating interventions that do not impose, do not mark the territory, but merge with it.

Their works, conceived in close relationship with the places, question the theme of water through different languages – sculpture, installation, sign, matter, light – in a continuous dialogue between presence and absence, permanence and transformation, forming a mosaic of experiences that makes Limbara a true space of diffuse art.

Far from the spectacular or decorative logic, the environmental art proposed by “Acquamontana” is configured as a gesture of attention, as an exercise in responsibility. The works do not seek to dominate the natural space, but to establish a subtle dialogue with it, made up of respect, balance and intuition. Art, in this context, assumes the role of mediator between human beings and living nature, between what is visible and what remains hidden. In the face of the ecological emergency and the progressive alienation from nature, art becomes an instrument of sensitive reconnection.

The route – accessible on foot or by car from September – invites the visitor to slow down, to observe, to be surprised. It is an itinerary not only physical, but also emotional and perceptive, in which the works are points of passage between worlds: that of man and that of the environment, that of art, of the present time and that of a deep, ancestral memory.

The exhibition is much more than an exhibition of design materials: it is the beginning of a journey. A journey that unites thought and landscape, art and ethics, form and substance. It is an invitation to leave the closed confines of the gallery to embrace open, changing, living spaces. To rediscover the beauty of a slow time, in which art lets itself be crossed by the environment, and the environment lets itself be crossed by the gaze.

In this fragile and precious encounter between man and nature, art does not offer answers, but possibilities. Possibilities of listening, of immersion, of participation and, perhaps, also of hope.

Giannella Demuro

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