From July 2020 the new E(ART)H OFF project in Castiglione Dei Pepoli in the province of Bologna, curated by Federica Fiumelli of Officina 15, has started.

The second exhibition project designed for the “Earth’s Room" part of the Paolo Guidotti Culture Center - is by the artist Jacopo Naccarato - entitled "Stone Bellies".

The E(ART)H OFF project was born as a further development of the existing #artOFF which puts contemporary art at the center in a dialogue with the community and the territory of the Apennines.

#artOFF is in fact an artistic promotion project born within the cultural association Officina 15 which aims to bring the community and the territory of the Apennines closer and more aware of contemporary art and the use of works.

For three years, the #artOFF project has been inviting artists of different generations to exhibit at the Association's spaces every month - every two months.

Given the importance of the “Earth’s Room" we want to expand the project by inviting one artist at a time with a specific work to dialogue with the room with the same cadence indicated above.

This thus becomes an opportunity to reread the important heritage of the room by putting it in dialogue with a complex language such as that of contemporary art.

The new project E(ART)H OFF - already contains in the name the double nature: earth - soil - and art. OFF wants to indicate the location in the Apennine territory "distant" and "different" from city centers.

As can be seen from the critical text of this second exhibition project:

“The “Stone Bellies” by Jacopo Naccarato - almost a sculptural oxymoron; portions of sandstone that are subtracted in favor of a poetic operation, lying and suspended on layered fabrics, as a memory that folds in the presence of a single salvific center - that of the abdomen - nerve center, erotic, telluric, with a sacral aura crowned by a small touch of a chisel, a navel that goes to seal the stasis of an eternal dream.

The female and male “Stone Bellies" portray with vigorous humility fragments of an embodied, possessed body that belonged to territories that the artist visited. The encounter with nature and origin takes place in the urgent and necessary search for Naccarato to better experience the materials, the very bodies of the work that will subsequently be created. But the artist's intervention here is minimal, almost a breath, a breath, a trace in the trace, which microscopically alters a nature that is already symbolic and rich in meaning."

It's still:

“The " Stone Bellies” are fragments of a natural as well as cultural archeology, epicenters of a pure, primitive, natural sensitivity, deposits of a deep and articulated imagination - rooted in both personal and collective history.”

Behind the evocative name “Earth’s Room" there is an exceptional display that traces the history of distant geological eras and takes us back to the origins of the Bolognese Apennines.

The materials that visitors can admire come from a passionate local researcher, Ultimo Bazzani, who donated to the Municipality of Castiglione over two thousand mineralogical and paleontological finds (fossils) collected in over thirty years of research in the area between Castiglione dei Pepoli, Camugnano and Grizzana Morandi.

The fossils were studied and classified at the University of Bologna by a group coordinated by Professor Gian Battista Vai, director of the "G. Capellini ".

There are four sections, highlighted according to geological and geographical criteria. Only one find belongs to the fauna of the Scagliose Clays, Argilliti a Palombini, the Anahoplites sp. which represents an exceptional find for the northern Apennines, unique in the Bolognese area. It is a small Ammonite, in excellent storage conditions. Other finds belong to the Limestone in Lucina: some specimens are particularly attractive due to the presence of crystals inside the bivalves. The largest number of finds refer to the fauna of the Bismantova Formation: on the one hand invertebrates often well preserved, on the other a considerable amount of fish remains and in particular shark teeth (over 800), which allows for a reconstruction both of the appearance of the seabed and of the water column above. Very few finds belong to the plants of the Cervarola Formation, all found in Bacino del Brasimone. These fossil remains, like ammonite, play an important role in the collection due to their peculiarity and rarity.

Alongside the study of materials, four thematic itineraries have been identified that wind along the Bolognese Apennines and retrace the sites from which the fossils on display come. In this way we wanted to create a precise and evident link between the territory and the museum that is its representation.

Very suggestive is the exhibition realization, curated by Ecosistema and Arklab: the room looks like a dimly lit environment (the walls are painted in dark colors), in which the fossils and the panels that illustrate and contextualize them are illuminated with concentrated beams of light , which isolate them from the context. At the center of the room, a special structure, which repeats the shapes of the fossil, houses the Anahoplites case, which in this way is also physically located in the center of the room and of the exhibition.

The contribution of the Suviana and Brasimone Lakes Park was also decisive for the creation of the "Sala della Terra", thanks to which the furnishings and information panels were created. In this way, the Hall has become one of the park's visitor centers, where themes complementary to those of the other three (Camugnano, Suviana and Poranceto) are developed.

Jacopo Naccarato (Castiglion F. No, AR, 1995) graduated in Painting in 2018 with Prof. Luca Bertolo, he attends the MA in Painting and Visual Arts with Prof. Luca Caccioni at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. Particularly interested in painting, he also works with sculpture and installation, according to a strictly pictorial vision. He is moved by a daily practice of "doing" and by a strictly concrete link with his work. The installations he creates with fabrics and earth and the paintings evoke intimate and mnemonic environments, figures close to man and the products of his genius.