Filippo Barbero

Acervus (2024 - Ongoing)

A single grain is not a heap. Yet, the heap cannot exist without that grain.
There is no precise moment when a place becomes a city, a street becomes a memory, a light becomes a home. It simply happens - it adds up, it accumulates like the grains of a growing heap that makes no sound. Just like heaps of salt that pile up silently, the identity of a place grows quietly too, through small repeated gestures, vague perceptions, and presences that recur over time. This reserved dimension revealed itself to me through imperceptible apparitions, as if I didn’t know what awaited me around the corner - as if the marks left by human hands suddenly became visual clues, witnesses to a deep relationship between people and their landscape. I sensed a bond that is solid and deeply rooted, yet constantly and freely evolving. It revealed itself to me in the voids as much as in the presences that inhabit the space - stirring conflicting emotions that are part of our collective memory. Just like a single grain - whether of salt or wheat - that falls from its heap without a sound, the visions of this place did the same. They appeared to me one by one, in their own time, and in utter silence.

This is an Artist Residency project I was invited to, organized by Note di Sguardi, an association focused on the area of Cervia.