Artist: Anne Fehres & Luke Conroy (collective)
Municipality: Stigliano (MT)
Host community: appARTEngo
Lucanian cultural enterprise: Artepollino

During the residency, we will invite the Lucanian community to celebrate its cultural heritage through food, sharing, and art. The culmination of this celebration will be the presentation of various large-scale photomontage artworks installed in the community’s public spaces. Each of these photomontage works will feature images of a specific individual or family from the community and a recipe they have created. Through their display in public spaces, the community and the broader public will be encouraged to reflect on recipes that hold significant individual or local cultural value, bringing them out of the home and into public spaces to be honored.

The specific visual outcome will consist of a series of 5 large-scale artworks (approximately 3×3 meters). These artworks will be temporarily installed in the public space of the specific Lucanian community, on one or more previously empty walls. Each artwork will be a surreal photomontage combining images of the local community and their recipes. All images included in the final artwork will be captured by the artists during their residency.

The final composition of these various photographic layers will be digitally completed in Photoshop. The photomontage compositions will be a series of celebratory works, playing with scale and form to present the recipe and the recipe’s creator side by side in a surreal and playful manner. The final compositions will be printed on paper and affixed to a wall in a public space, with the help of the local community. Next to each of these works will be a short text detailing the recipe and the people depicted in the work.

Through this work, the local community will be invited to reflect on itself and on the cultural heritage embodied in food. The sharing of stories and multisensory experiences between the artists and the community will also be encouraged. Through the public presentation of this work, the local community will be encouraged to take pride in its heritage and to connect in new ways. Through the presentation of the project in the manual/dossier and the artist’s online presence, this celebration of cultural heritage in rural communities will be brought to a wide international audience.