VERDECOPRENTE FESTIVAL.01
Second edition September 20th – 29th 2013-08-20 Maria Lai and the excersise of art

Verdecoprente is a project of Vocabolomacchia teatro.studio, a production laboratory also covering research and formation in the field of performing and visual arts, an independent formation that works on an International level. It stems from the association Ippocampo, a cultural non profit facility.
The Festival is being realized through the participation of and in alliance with other artists, creative professionals, citizens, institutions, companies and local authorities of the district of Amelia. It is based on a system of collective promotion gathering private and public funds as well as co-funding by the promoters, collaboration of the authorities and administrative departments and contributions obtained via networking and events.
For 2013, the provisional list confirms the presence of the communities of Alviano, Amelia, Giove, Lugnano in Teverina, Penna in Teverina, the Region of Umbria and the Province of Terni, Unicoop Tirreno, Urban Experience media partner and others.
In its edition 0, Verdecoprente has been defined as the festival of landscapes. In fact the festival concentrates on the “landscapes that nourish us”. These landscapes are intended to be spaces where culture and nature meet taking shape in contemporary scenes, arts and poetry. Theatre, music, singing, performing and visual arts, senso-perceptional and multimedia trails, site specific installations are the artistic writings with which the original trail of the festival reticulates the territory. A total theatre, an intervention that shall be displayed on the territory in unconventional places and means showing specific aspects. The festival is supported by the Europeen Heritage Days.

This year the festival opens with a project of Creative Artistic Residencies meant to accommodate artists of all ages and nationalities who work on a professional level in the field of arts and contemporary theatre. And for this great cultural occasion it is meant to be a forum for encounter, exchange and formative action. It is also an incentive to develop the potential of the territory that is directed versus a sustainable and desirable reception of tourists.
After all, the festival reminds us that art and culture are the irreplaceable heritage of every community focusing the events on the figure and thought of Maria Lai. She is the artist that Verdecoprente 2013 is dedicated to as homage to her landscapes of amazement which, through the focus of the festival, shall nourish guests and the territory alike by their mutual visions.

Meeting Maria Lai with Verdecoprente: The exercise of the 5 “S”
Magic, poetry, narrative science, risk and curiosity, tenacity caught in works that speak the language of inwardness and effortlessness are the artistic guideline of the Sardic artist who with an extraordinary sense for the contemporary knew how to transmit an original unique language both simple and complex, organic in work and thought, strongly inclined to explore the artist’s universe as well as the spectator’s imagination whom she considered the inhabitant of the artistic creation.
S like solco (furrow), sasso (stone), scure (axe), sole (sun), sale (salt), 5 words used by Maria Lai to explain all that serves the peasant to cultivate olives but also the artist in the process of creation. Such metaphor indicates the furrow as the excavation in tradition, the stone as the necessary concreteness in art, the axe as the importance of constructive rigor, the sun as the gaze towards the infinite, the salt as the element of a particular chemistry that transforms the bitterness into sweetness just like art knows how to transform the most diverse emotions into one single resource and a commodity to offer and exchange.
In the image of the olive tree and the artist, so close to the Umbrian land, emerges the metaphor and leads us to the reasons for a festival rooting into these landscapes affirming art, culture and nature as “places” necessary for life. They are once more the reasons for a landscape as theatre, evocated by the geographer Eugenio Turri whom we shall explore while still searching the artistic mirror in an idea of theatre as landscape while marking the time that separates us from the new edition.