Rescuing books from pulping and entrusting them to the light, to dialogue with trees, with rain and
sun, with the nocturnal passage of stars, means offering the paper that once held the written word
a new life span – albeit as fleeting as any earthly or human time: a time of intimacy with beauty,
with the soil, the wind, the cycles of decay and rebirth that are the rhythm and language of nature.

– Antonio Prete, on the “Cartomastodonte”

On Wednesday, July 23, 2025, at 7:00 PM, the public presentation of “Cartomastodonte”, the large-scale site-specific installation by Daniele Papuli, will take place in Boncore di Nardò, at the Campo dei Giganti.
The essential material of the work consists of thirty-five thousand books destined for pulping, gathered from libraries across Puglia has enthusiastically joined and actively contributed to the vision of creating an art and regeneration project – transforming waste into beauty. This collection journeyed across the entire region, from Salento to Gargano, involving the libraries of Martignano, Castrignano, Cursi, Corigliano d’Otranto, Cutrofiano, Galatina, Monteroni, Lucugnano, Patù, Matino, Taviano, Brindisi, Torre S. Susanna, Oria, San Marzano, Pulsano, Taranto, Crispiano, San Ferdinando di Puglia, Canosa, Bari, Fasano, Martina Franca, Foggia, Torre Maggiore, San Severo, and Lecce. The opening evening – featuring the presence of Daniele Papuli, Chiara Agagiù, Ulderico Tramacere, and Mauro Paolo Bruno, Head of the Innovation Networks and Library-Museum Hubs Section of the Puglia Region – will begin with a performance by “Tessuto Corporeo”, curated by Alberto Cacopardi and Ilaria Carlucci.
All librarians who collaborated on the creation of the work are invited to attend.

Paper and the Campo dei Giganti in the Work of Daniele Papuli
With the “Cartomastodonte,” Daniele Papuli deepens his exploration of paper as a sensitive, porous, and narrative material. The work took shape in recent days through a collaborative, participatory process within the “surreal suspension” of the Campo dei Giganti – a land art and regeneration project in the countryside of Boncore, initiated by artist Ulderico Tramacere, with whom Papuli has been creatively aligned since the beginning.
The installation emerges as a macro-form: a sediment, an exposed fossil, a living archive entrusted to the land. Books once destined for destruction—collected thanks to the Libraries of Puglia with support from the Library and Museum Hub of Lecce and the Castromediano Museum – have been arranged in a dedicated area of the field. Each is opened halfway, overlapped and aligned, following an organic, herringbone-like pattern. The book becomes root, it spreads. Time, rain, sun, and the earth elements will act upon the paper, transforming it into a paper-based natural structure.
The Cartomastodonte is also a meditation on form: geometric, modular, and mutable. The installation unfolds like a body drawing a space “among the Giants,” in a landscape marked by phytosanitary crisis and environmental transformation. It is Papuli’s first sculptural paper work explicitly designed to be entrusted to the earth – an imaginative endeavor inventing a new landscape.
Papuli has been part of the Campo dei Giganti ecosystem from its inception. In 2023, he had already marked this place with “Rossoscultografia,” a powerful installation probing time, signs, and the visual density of red as a symbol of the lifeblood of senescent trees—still powerful and alive.

With Cartomastodonte, his work intertwines even more deeply with the landscape and the logic of cultural regeneration, expanding the relational space between art, matter, community, and environment. The Campo dei Giganti thus welcomes a new transformative gesture: not a monument, but a process; not a sculpture to contemplate, but an organism to experience and traverse.

A collective construction, brought to life by many participants in recent days, born from fragility—and offering back a vision.

A Note from the Artist
In his statement, the artist writes:
“CARTOMASTODONTE, in its evolution and formation, has taken on the character of a kind of macro/microbiota of the earth. A vast cell surrounded by red soil, with internal dynamics, structures and deconstructions, evolutionary chains.
The Campo dei Giganti becomes a vast epidermis revealing its substrate, its deepest layer. As our eyes follow the shifts and modulations of the 35,000 books used as formal skeleton, we are confronted with an anomaly – an evolving stain that disintegrates, swells, becomes something else. The book-module calcifies, strengthens.
Paper expresses its own permanence, it evolves, and gives us back time, waiting, the suspension of time itself. The books lie dormant, and those who once held them, who helped build this work, along with the occasional wandering visitor – become its guardians.”

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.