Stefano Arienti. Europa Libera

Dep Art Out is pleased to present Europa Libera (Free Europe), a new site-specific intervention by Stefano Arienti, conceived especially for the trullo in Ceglie Messapica and curated by Carmelo Cipriani.

For more than thirty years, Stefano Arienti has developed an artistic practice that explores the relationship between image, material, and place through essential gestures of collecting, transforming, and recomposing. His work is grounded in the ability to reveal the poetic potential of ordinary materials and natural elements, bringing to light unexpected connections between experience and representation. Maps, landscapes, natural phenomena, the memory of places, and images drawn from visual culture are continually reinterpreted, giving rise to works in which not only the final visual outcome but the very process of construction becomes a collective tool for dialogue and understanding.

For Dep Art Out, Arienti has created a monumental political map of Europe using exclusively materials gathered from the land surrounding the trullo. Stones and other natural elements are assembled into a large-scale drawing that visitors can walk through, transforming the ground itself into an image. The work is conceived as a space to be physically experienced, inviting visitors to step literally into the geography of Europe. Symbolically, the drawing places Apulia at the center of the composition, positioning the trullo at one of the map's pivotal points. The site hosting the intervention thus becomes the very focal point of the representation, suggesting a reversal of conventional geographical perspectives: Europe is reimagined from the standpoint of a concrete place, only apparently peripheral, yet historically overlooking the Mediterranean and naturally oriented towards the East.

"The intervention," curator Carmelo Cipriani observes, "belongs to a line of research that has long informed the artist's practice: the construction of complex images through the accumulation of natural or reclaimed materials, each retaining its own identity while contributing to a collective form or structure. A significant example is Gocce (Drops), a site-specific installation created for the National Museum of San Marino, in which Arienti outlined the geography of Europe through a multitude of glass jars. In Ceglie Messapica, this research—where material is never merely an expressive medium but determines the very meaning of the image—finds an entirely new expression. Stone replaces glass, introducing a geological and historical dimension deeply rooted in the Apulian landscape. These are the very stones that, gathered from the fields over the centuries, gave shape to dry-stone walls, terraces, and trulli, transforming a natural material into a defining element of the region's identity. The map of Europe thus emerges from the same material that constructs the local landscape, establishing a dialogue between the continental scale and the more intimate, everyday dimension of the Murge countryside. The only chromatic element employed is blue, evoking the sea and the sky, while also recalling the European flag. It is a minimal yet decisive presence, capable of uniting the natural dimensions of the landscape with the symbolic and institutional dimensions of the European project. Colour thus becomes both a sign of belonging and an invitation to reflect upon the very meaning of the idea of Europe."

The work carries an explicitly political dimension. The geographical map is not employed to assert the permanence of borders, but rather to question the role of the European Union in the present day. Arienti proposes an image of the continent as a shared space, founded on collective responsibility rather than national identity. The intervention highlights the importance of supranational institutions as instruments of cooperation, peace, and mediation among peoples, opposing the construction of a supportive political community to the logic of empires and geopolitical antagonisms. Rather than simply drawing a map, Stefano Arienti constructs a geography of matter, in which the landscape of Ceglie Messapica becomes the point from which to rethink Europe, its identity, and its future.
Web: www.depart.it/it/evento-ste...