L'Aquila, a candidate for Italian Capital of Culture 2022, focuses on culture, art and science

L’Aquila ’s candidacy for Capital of Culture 2022: would be a "true watershed that would allow the city and the territory, and the communities that inhabit it, to feel understood, encouraged and supported by the entire national and international public opinion, not only in the definitive relaunch of a new cycle of social, economic and cultural development, but also in its role as a post-crisis resilience laboratory capable of inspiring, thanks to the heritage of experience accumulated in the long, difficult years of the post-earthquake period, the other inland areas and theentire country that must now learn to rebuild on the rubble of another catastrophe of a different but no less serious nature," according to the candidacy dossier.

Culture would play a central role in the reconstruction process, “the connective material capable of scarring, telling, highlighting, restoring meaning and dignity to the traumatic experience, which is not removed, but on the contrary becomes the foundation of a new life of the built environment and, metaphorically, of the community, with its powerful aesthetic value that arouses emotion, passion, desire for sharing, innovative visionary.”

Thereare four goals for the L’Aquila Capitale Italiana della Cultura project: to repopulate the city and its territory and reknit its social fabric; to promote a new model of culturally-based development and well-being; to become the European reference center of expertise on post-disaster resilience; and to formulate a development strategy scalable to other similar realities in Italy’s inland areas.

Three female scientists lent their voices and faces, for one of the videos dedicated to the candidacy, to the verses that Alda Merini dedicated to L’Aquila in the aftermath of the 2009 earthquake, “Aquila 2009”: Alessandra Faggian, pro-rector and director of the Social Sciences Area at the Gran Sasso Science Institute; Elisabetta Baracchini, a professor at GSSI and dark matter researcher; and Marica Branchesi, an astrophysicist and professor at GSS.

Significance of the video is the possibility of the combination of art and science to build the possible version of the ideal world. Alda Merini’s verses are also featured on one of the illumino-graphic installations as part of the Luce d’Artisti project, in the special edition dedicated to the bid that will continue until Jan. 18, 2021, when the winning city will be proclaimed. The installation has been placed in the Four Cantons area and is also accompanied by a voiceover reciting the poem in full.

For more info: https: //www.laquilacapitale2022.it/

Pictured is the Basilica of Collemaggio.

L'Aquila, a candidate for Italian Capital of Culture 2022, focuses on culture, art and science

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