CSQA. EU Regulation n. 1151/2012 aims to valorise products that present special characteristics due exclusively or essentially to their geographic area of origin. The term “designation of origin” therefore means the name of a delimited geographic area used to designate an agricultural or food product originating from that place, whose quality or characteristics are essentially or exclusively due to that geographic area (including natural and human factors). It is fundamental for the production, transformation and processing to take place in that same area. The production process must adhere to procedural guidelines.
Why don’t you register the D.O.P. of Ventricina? D.O.P. ISN’T WORTH IT is the cutting answer given by the artisan producers of the spicy salami from Abruzzo. Ventricina producers reject the advantages of D.O.P. because of the disproportionate expenses and requirements involved in D.O.P. conferral. Paradoxically, denominations that guarantee purchase of the product on the final market are accessible to medium and large businesses, who are able to bear and amortize the costs of certification. Instead, these expenses are not viable for small artisan producers. This sculpture is the synthesis and the evolution of the project through its constitutive elements, the spaghetti drying rack as a domestic element and the marble from the mountain, a refuge and hotbed of rebellion. For d’Amore, the ratchet strap is an element of energy and knowledge, representing human genius with minimum strength and maximum yield, and in this case tightens like a suspected bandit.
Some of the social problems of post- unification southern Italy that, for political choice or desperation, brought people to live as bandits, are the same that forced people from the following decades up to now to choose escape, marginalisation and illegality. In Italy, with the term “smell of banditry”, the post-unification National Guard monitored those suspected of having contacts with bandits. In the town of Guilmi, a legend tells how townspeople passed objects and food on a string between two hillsides facing each other. I involved the women of Guilmi to prepare spaghetti alla chitarra in public, a thread of the memory between history and present. Participants in the “ecological walk”, organized during the days of the artistic residency, were asked to contribute to the recognition and gathering of wild, edible foods. The result was a plentiful collective harvest of herbs, mushrooms, fruits, flowers and roots, which I used to make a condiment. The dish served to the public of the Guilmi Art Project, spaghetti alla chitarra with wild condiment, evokes the riotous meeting between the domestic, legal life of townspeople and the wild life of bandits, quite like the smell of banditry.
Andrea d'Amore 