As part of the traditional September Fest weekend in Londa, the concluding moment of A dimora—the artist residency of Montagna Fiorentina, now in its third edition—takes place.
Artists Andrea Grasselli, Chiara Gambirasio, Gaia Coals, Martina Cioffi, and Samuel Rosi (MUZ) were selected from over 170 applicants through a national open call. During the summer, they lived and worked in the area, developing original projects that reflect the experiences and impressions gathered during the residency.
On September 14 from 3:30 PM, they will present to the public the works created during the residency, offering a perspective on Montagna Fiorentina through diverse artistic languages. The afternoon will unfold as a collective, itinerant exhibition spread across the territory of Londa, allowing the public to encounter the works directly in the places that inspired them.
PROGRAM:
→ 3:30 PM – Inauguration of the work Spaesaggio by Chiara Gambirasio
Bivacco di Poggio Ratoio
Cement, sand, iron, pigments
Technical support for production: Fabrizio Gambirasio, Tommaso Adolmi
What happens if we change the way we see?
Chiara Gambirasio engages with a vast green area marking the entrance to the Casentinesi Forests, Monte Falterona, and Campigna National Park, designing a work that overwhelms the surrounding landscape with simple, disarming signs.
Spaesaggio is conceived as a game, a device connecting the visible with the invisible, the observer with what is contemplated, to dissolve canonical boundaries and imagine new ones.
There is no understanding, no vision except through the movement the work provokes: from the colored tiles inviting the first step, to winding paths among blades of grass—change perspective!—leading to a jagged labyrinth.
The horizon, the color of flowers, the gentle slope, as well as the air and forest, become part of a harmonious yet abstract synthesis that calls for a slow, personal, and meaningful exploration.
What happens when we experience our own way of seeing?
How to reach Poggio Ratoio
You can reach Poggio Ratoio by car via the dirt road starting in front of Ristorante I Mandri (https://maps.app.goo.gl/68tcmHBHfJULgvor8). Length: 2.5 km, about 8 minutes. The road is slightly rough in some sections (restoration works are underway). Drive slowly and use a sufficiently high-clearance car or an off-road vehicle.
It can also be reached on foot along the same dirt road (altitude gain: 250 m, walking time: about 40 minutes) or via trails starting from the Stia–Londa state road near the Croce ai Mori pass.
→ 6:15 PM – Inauguration of the work Un guscio rotto da un dolore antico, bianco germoglio by Martina Cioffi
Sports fields, Lake Park, Londa
Carved, charred wood treated with linseed oil; glazed and lustered ceramics
Technical support for production: Mauro Bordignon
Enchanted by the Etruscan rites of the Lake of the Idols, Martina Cioffi forges a reconciliation: singing of the beech tree and its properties, she weaves a sculptural poem animated by catharsis and nestled in disillusionment.
The precious wooden sculptures appear as gifts to heal the fierce wounds of a past scarred by greed, profit, and speculation. Humanity invoked nature only to render it barren and voiceless, carrying an ancient pain—now eased by the artist, who, mimicking the generous beech that for centuries made the surrounding waters medicinal, returns the plant, the earth, and the water to themselves.
Stripped of human features—now too noisy—the work becomes faggiòla, the sweetest part, to carry a message of rebirth.
→ 7:00 PM – Inauguration of the work LOMBRA by Gaia Coals
Sports fields, Lake Park, Londa
Timed LED projection
In Londa’s sharp present stands its dam, the infrastructure that created the artificial lake, marking the beginning of a new time, a new space, and new relationships. By building the profiles of the town together with its inhabitants, Gaia Coals has traced a physical and metaphorical threshold on the town’s horizon, elevating the dam to a monument.
An abstract manifestation of a concrete representation, LOMBRA transforms the dam into a sentient entity: with a real yet impossible shadow, it graphically places itself at the center of the narrative. With its new contrasts, the immense concrete wall appears as a junction, guiding bodies from the urbanized landscape to the natural one; a musical accord uniting different rhythms in the simultaneity of time’s organic flow.
Just before sunset and until shortly after dusk, the work reveals itself—charged with memories of peasant vigils and with the desire for a new sociality.
→ 7:45 PM – Inauguration of the work Tempi d’oro by Samuel Rosi (Muz)
Piazza Umberto I, Londa
Iron, gold leaf, 2700K LED projectors
Technical support for production: Canio Colangelo, Cosmic Light, Decorestauro, Idroazeta, SC Costruzioni Meccaniche
The gaze fades when it wanders aimlessly, caressing the tepid everyday, weighed down by an oppressive imagery.
Through a carefully ornamental gesture, Tempi d’oro seems to awaken its surroundings from slumber, like an ember buried in ashes: incandescent to the touch and sparkling to the eye.
The work embeds itself in the life of the place, inhabiting the depths of the historic fountain and unexpectedly adorning it with a grate of sinuous forms. Now, the act of seeing becomes lively, darting: iron gleams, a drop shines—new eyes looking at old monuments.
Samuel Rosi (Muz) conceives the work as a liminal device, suspending the ordinary in a passage between perception and vision—when, at dusk, light fills the structure from within, spreading into the air, echoing a golden time when cultivated fields once shone. The fountain becomes a source again, from which springs forth a near future, a long-awaited promise.
→ 9:30 PM – Screening of the work Cinema sospeso by Andrea Grasselli
Cinema of Londa, via Don Tommaso Salvi
Audiovisual video installation, 18 minutes
Technical support for production: Emilio Gratelli, Samuele Assenti
Archive images: Emilio Gratelli, Acchiughi family, Cecchi family
The encounter with waiting is what generated the documentary video Cinema sospeso. A long wait, in which the inhabitants of Londa still find themselves, hopeful for the reopening of the town’s cinema, closed since 2020.
In search of a calmer vision of the present, Andrea Grasselli has explored its past—made of archive images, orally transmitted memories, and an intricate weave of affections.
Between frame and imagination, between found footage and artifice, the work lets the eye dance languidly—now on the eternal moss covering a rock, now in the raucous dance of chairs and feet—bearing witness to how such a local story can become a standard-bearer of a universal feeling.
Cinema sospeso is waiting itself, the entr’acte between the two acts of history: past and future, with its clear vision of the present that knows no extremism or opposition, but extends as far as the gaze can touch its complexities.
For this exhibition, the work is projected on the outer wall of the cinema, slipping into the gap of a longer story, in medias res.