Viviana Bovino at Campo dei Giganti, June 7th, 2025

At the end of the summer of 2024, we began working with Ulderico Tramacere and Chiara Agagiù on the details of the project. During a long meeting, we began to investigate in depth the motivations that had led them to conceive the Erasmus Plus project “Sulle Spalle dei Giganti” (On the Shoulders of Giants).

Ulderico and Chiara shared many details regarding the history of Villaggio Boncore, the dynamics that Xylella had triggered, as well as the economic and social repercussions. We spent a long time reflecting on how much the identity of the territory and its population had been scarred.

It immediately seemed evident to me that the profound need was much broader than simply creating a work of Land Art; rather, it was about giving life to a “vision,” a dream desired for and with the community, a place of encounter and communal regeneration.

“What do you want from us, why did you invite us?” I asked Ulderico. “Maristella Martella (1) advised us to involve you. The reality is that we want a miracle from you!”

We are not experts in miracles, I thought, but yes, we are sorcerer’s apprentices, so we could have done something!

Listening to the answers they provided, we understood that it was BRIDGES / PONTI what could energetically and creatively regenerate the community of that territory.

We worked together for months, trying to take advantage of LIRT’s trips to Puglia, to be able to see each other and, above all, to go and get to know the Campo.

The moment arrived at the end of November 2024; on a somewhat drizzly morning, I arrived in Lecce. From there, by car directly towards Boncore. During the car journey with Ulderico and Chiara, we never stopped talking; I had little time and had to gather a lot of information. When working with a community, first of all, one must listen, get to know, and ask questions discreetly. It is an investigation, an anthropological field study, a real collection of sensitive data.

On some occasions, those who saw us at work said that we are “the community doctors.” I don’t entirely like this definition, because we don’t go into a community to teach and even less to heal; we arrive with the commitment to facilitate, to stir frequencies, to make people meet again, to recreate the connections between what the community already possesses but which, on its own, it can no longer see or appreciate. It is a path that serves to ensure that a new possibility, a new collective creative process, emerges.

On the way to the Campo dei Giganti, we stopped at a bar; there we met the craftsman Sandro Cazza. He introduced himself and offered me a coffee. He told me about his works in Lecce stone, about his collaboration in the Campo. We joked. I described to him a bit of what we would do, which was that we would organize a large meeting, a celebration, for the people of the area, but that there would also be invited artists.

I didn’t speak about theatre. This is one of the rules we have understood over time. Often the word theatre intimidates, only because one does not know well what is behind a path of theatrical creation. We take care to choose the appropriate words and arrange the basis to generate a fluid and serene encounter with people. Theatre arrives at a later moment, when the ground is ready, as in agriculture, as in sowing.

We set off for the Campo. I remember lands dotted with decapitated trunks. Trees with fiery hearts. Expanses of grey nature; huge trees like ghosts.

Then finally we arrived.

I remember the sky, of a bright light blue, and the olive trees that stood out like screams, piercing the clouds. Like hands begging for justice.

Ulderico, with the help of the community, covered the olive trees with lime (an ancient practice of protecting trees that was once widely used in the countryside), transforming a sad landscape into an extremely poetic organic sculpture, which makes one think of the Phoenix, the sacred bird that burns and then is reborn.

Suddenly the rain started. We shut ourselves in an old bus that Ulderico, together with some people from Boncore, transformed into a mobile office, besides being the only indoor place in the Campo. Ulderico showed me the catalog of the exhibition he created on the olive trees, the notes, the drawings, the sculptures (beautiful roots and branches that nature modeled and that he collected in the Campo). Ulderico created a map of the trees in the Campo and wants to create a digital platform that can give a voice to the trees; in fact, a story will be associated with each tree.

I thought of LIRT’s trips to South America; we met many original communities; in Darien (Colombia) a community leader told us that for the Gunadule, trees are open-air libraries, sages, holders of living memory.

But in Salento, this can no longer happen. The trees are dead. I wondered where all the stories the olive trees had listened to for centuries had ended up, where those songs, where the voices of the peasants who worked the fields?

“Excuse me, here he is… it’s Cosimino,” Chiara suddenly exclaimed.

Cosimino arrived with a tray of sweets: “I would have brought something savory, a meat rustic pizza to have an aperitif! But they told me you are vegetarian and Maggiolina, my wife, made the sweets!”.

Thus began the conversation with Cosimino, a brilliant connoisseur of the fields, of the history of the struggles for land and justice in the land of Salento. A wood craftsman, promoter, together with his wife and his two children, of a local sustainable tourism project. A place created and nourished with love for the land and the people.

Cosimo created Le Fattizze in the nineties, a campsite attentive to sustainability and permaculture; it was one of the first in the area. Those were the years of the claims for Porto Selvaggio (2) and he, together with his family, made a choice, positioning himself on the side of the land. Cosimino told me about his days, about his habit of singing to the trees. “My olive trees are all alive,” he told me, “I talk to them.” Cosimino tells me about the “taricate,” the roots that have remained in the ground, precisely those that he and other craftsmen in the area have patiently collected and sculpted. Transforming the death of the tree into a new claim for life. He speaks to me about Salento, about community work, about the memory that has not been lost, but that they must rebuild all together.

I took a photo of Cosimino (after asking his permission); today I look at that shot again, and I see a man of almost seventy who obstinately tries to defend the land.

I can’t stop thinking that this BRIDGE must have the purpose of “insisting on life.”

I haven’t forgotten that encounter. A few weeks after my return to Spain, following a meeting with Gregorio Amicuzi, we proposed to Chiara that the residency be called “RADICATE,” a word that is a hybrid between “taricate” and “radici” (roots), but which in its sound encompasses rooting, uprooting, and memory.

I report this experience as a story, with details that certainly are not usual in reports or academic articles because this seems to me the most appropriate stylistic form to restore life to a path that is not the application of an aseptic methodological device.

It is a strategy, an approach, a practice based on principles. One of the fundamental points is to open oneself to listening and predispose oneself to interaction. It is not a vertical method; it looks more like what in the theatrical field is called a “collective creation.”

In this creation process, there is a direction, a task that in this case was carried out by Gregorio Amicuzi and me, but the hosts (Ulderico and Chiara) and the key people in the community (Cosimino and Sandro) are necessary.

By establishing a bond of dialogue and understanding within this first constellation of people, it is possible to lay the foundations for creating interaction with the entire community.

The architecture of the RADICATE encounter

For the project to come to life and strength, we followed stages and respected roles and rituals that, over the years, we have structured working with communities.

To carry out the project, we felt the need to respond to the concrete needs of the community, to establish contacts with existing groups in the social fabric, to open an Open Call aimed at having with us artists interested in the creation process of a traveling show. We identified spaces, places, held meetings with people from the local community. And only in the last instance did we arrive at the creation of the show that we performed on the evening of June 7th.

But this brief summary needs to be explored to understand the factors that make the realized proposal possible.

• The community need: To establish the conditions for a project to have a real impact on the community, it is necessary that the community itself has the capacity to express the problems or needs to be addressed. In the case of the Campo dei Giganti, Ulderico was the catalyst, the person who, by being in contact with us and listening, managed to transmit the needs of the community.
• The stranger: Every community has its own stories and rules. Over the years, we have understood that by intervening as “foreign” experts to the community, we could benefit from the fact that the community identifies us solely with the art to which we dedicate ourselves. For this reason, it tends to trust us, as we are “strangers”; people external to the dynamics of the community; but at the same time not completely unknown since a “local host” acts as our guarantor.
• The hosts: The choice of the host is fundamental. These are people from the place who have contacts; sometimes they are leaders, other times they are very active, sociable people capable of creating bonds. These people (in the case of the Campo, Ulderico and Chiara) are fundamental because they are the ones who introduce us to the community, support us in managing logistical needs, and have contacts with the locals. The hosts have great enthusiasm and want to launch themselves into impossible feats not for themselves, but for the entire community.
• Key people: These are reference people for the community and whom the community respects. They are people who have a particular ability to involve others; in some way, once you manage to involve them, it becomes much easier to reach the rest of the community.
• Time It is important for us to accurately choose the days of the week, the period, the duration of the initiative. The preparation meetings with the community, as well as the final party, must be held at times and on days that are accessible to the community. In this case, we chose a long weekend right at the beginning of June. We had to make sure it was possible to hold the meeting outdoors and that people could follow us in all phases.
• Participants in the training activities An open call was activated for the encounter. Multidisciplinary artists between 25 and 60 years old from different regions of Italy joined. They were the backbone of the show. We worked together in the rehearsal room about 8 hours a day. For the rest of the time, we shared mealtimes together and, as usually happens, we slept in the same structure. In this case, we were lodged at Le Fattizze, in the middle of nature. The times outside the rehearsal room are spaces to get to know each other or repeat songs and texts together or to take notes. Beautiful friendships are born and a new close-knit community flourishes in a few days. Often people are interested in our group’s work because they know our trajectory in the field of theatrical anthropology. In other cases, they are curious or touched by the theme. Sometimes they are artists from the area happy to have “at home” other artists coming from new geographical or artistic territories.
• The big circle, the magical moment that opens all Bridges The encounter at the Campo dei Giganti began with a big circle in which the promoters of the project, we from LIRT, the artists who had responded to the Open Call, the local artists and craftsmen, and all the people from the area interested in collaborating were invited. This is a ritual that we always care for with attention.

In the Campo, we created a circle of chairs among the trees. The meeting took place at 6:30 PM on Sunday, May 31st. The guests from the community had been called to participate in a meeting in which the activity of the artistic celebration of June 7th would be presented. At the end, a banquet was planned.

We opened the circle with the call of a Pacific Shell.

Almost 50 people of all ages showed up. We talked about the realization of a large community celebration dedicated to the land and the olive trees. The olive trees which are symbols of identity, memory. A great festival of the arts in which there would be space for both the interventions of the performers who responded to the call and those of the members of the community. As often happens in the initial circle, people from the community who do not deal with performing arts initially hesitated to define what they could offer. We gave examples: Every community has something special; what we were asking them was to understand what they were able to share with others, what was their specialty to share with the community to create this great party. We talked about olive trees and land. We talked about the importance of highlighting the energy of a land that has lived the mourning of its trees, but that needs to return to harmonizing in order to be reborn.

Little by little, many started to come forward: I carve wood… I know master Toni, he is a wonderful sculptor… I work at school with children… I can involve them… I do rituals by maintaining large boulders in balance and for years I have worked on the “lamentations” of Calimera… I am an actress, I have little time, but I can share a text…. I know a child who plays the pizzica… I have a horse… and so on.

It was a week of insistence, of searching for the impossible, of calls, of research. Finally we succeeded, we found ourselves submerged by a swarming of beauty and proposals; a reality had surfaced that until then had remained subdued. The feeling was that of an isolated underground river that suddenly finds the reason and the impulse to be able to come out into the open and irrigate the land again.

In the circle, we shared Ulderico’s proposal who had asked us to do a miracle, and that we like challenges, a miracle is perhaps too ambitious, but with the help of the community we will try to do… a magic!

At the end of the meeting, Gregorio asked everyone to close their eyes, and I sang, for their hearts, for the trees, for the wind, for the birds perched on the dry branches and for the joy of the days to come.

Even before starting

We asked all participants to bring some materials: “Dear participants, our meeting will begin shortly. The training will be linked to the theme of Roots, memory, the connection with the land and the need to start precisely from the land to be able to write the future among the communities. Our work will be created in dialogue with the great Olive Trees of the Campo dei Giganti. The olive tree is a symbol. A strong tree that speaks of the memory of the land and the community, tells of stories lived in its cool shade, speaks of work in the fields. It also speaks of fire in the heart, the same fire that burned the trees considered infected. A blow to the land and to the identity of a people. The olive tree is the tree of the Mediterranean, and today its value is charged with new meanings. In the coming days, we will return together to this land, to these trees and their roots. We will be accompanied by the people of the local community of Villaggio Boncore, those who have experienced this “attack” firsthand. We return together to the land to transform the wound into a glimmer through which a new light can enter. To write the future together. The training will end with a performance based on the practices of collective creation. For this reason, your active and proactive presence is fundamental. We ask everyone to take inspiration from the text we shared here and let yourselves be inspired for the work. We ask you to bring:

1. Comfortable black clothes (trousers that do not go beyond the ankles and short-sleeved shirt that covers the shoulder and lumbar area well) for training;
2. comfortable shoes for working outdoors;
3. Water bottle to avoid use of plastic bottles;
4. A memorized text that relates to the central themes of the workshop.
5. A popular or traditional song (any language or dialect) that has a connection with the themes and that you are able to sing. Not necessarily the whole text but at least one verse and the chorus by heart.
6. A “special” dress or outfit with comfortable shoes (in various shades of green) but without prints or writing. We will have to use this outfit in the Campo dei Giganti, so it is important that you can be at ease.
7. One or more musical instruments, if you play.
8. Pen and notebook to take notes. The required materials must be available from the first day of practical work (the morning of June 2nd). Thank you and… see you soon!”.

The preparation of materials is intended to make participants enter the theme even before the direct meeting. Having to choose, learn by heart, select, allows everyone to gradually enter the work. Asking themselves questions, establishing priorities, expressing a taste, understanding that the process takes place in a participatory way and confronting their own discipline.

We have been doing this work for years and we know how much it causes a crisis to have to bring a “completed task,” the mind invents traps and excuses… and the participants avoid and run away from themselves until the last. Sometimes inventing bizarre stories. But we have to deal with ourselves if we want to be on stage. The actor’s/actress’s art is first of all an exercise of deep search for the sincerity that is in us. This is why theatre transforms. Before having an impact on the public, the path itself becomes a journey of transformation for those who undertake it.

Which compromises to make

Every community has its own needs and habits. Not being part of the context in which one goes to work requires an extremely high exercise of listening and professionalism. One must be able to understand what the priorities of theatre are that cannot be compromised, but at the same time, one must define what the times and needs of the community are that cannot be forced into a process that is too stressful.

We chose to establish a rehearsal schedule with the participants of the open call from 9.00 to 17.00, with an hour lunch break, in which we ate together. We left the possibility for some members to miss some afternoon meetings occasionally. Some of the participants traveled more than an hour and a half by car every day to reach Boncore.

As for the participants of the local community, we asked them what they wanted to share, and when they could have the time to show us their proposals. We only asked to be able to be with us on the day of the final party at least an hour before the start of the show. We asked some of the participants for the impossible, and they did it, for the passion and the pleasure of being part of the great party together with the community.

This was the case of the beautiful horsewoman whom we asked to ride a wonderful white horse bareback right at the end of the show.

one participant had to leave the training one day early. We talked to her, and after a long reflection and following her participation in the workshops, a plastic art proposal was born; some huge eye-leaves that were an important object during the final show.

Training, rehearsals and the show as a pretext

With the group of participants who responded to the open call, we used some training in the room to be able to establish a shared language and clear work codes.

We started every appointment punctually. We were barefoot and in comfortable clothes to be able to face a dance-theatre work. The morning opened with an hour of work on the availability of the holistic body: loosening the joints, putting the fascia and muscles to work, aligning energy and breathing. We used the practices of yoga, pranayama, the alignment of meridians with the Motoyama method. In the second part of training, the bodies met forms or principles far from everyday life to learn to face actions/reactions, the dialogue with one’s own fears and the possibility of finding freedom even within a limit.

In particular, training was applied that refers to theatrical anthropology such as the practice of the elastic body, dance-theatre, vocality, rhythm and polyphonic singing.

Each participant faced the encounter with something new that broke the balance of the system and offered the possibility of opening the gaze towards new dimensions of corporal balance and its relationship with space, time and others. The group had to solve riddles involving bodily integrity, sometimes facing them with greater ease and playfulness, other times feeling the complexity of the task and standing before a challenge involving many levels of being.

This effort allowed for the re-signification of problems, the invention of solutions and the stimulation of divergent thinking. In practice, we expanded the capacity for vision and analysis of the dimension of difficulty and danger, inviting people to open the range of their possibilities at an energetic, logical, resolutive, practical and corporal level. All this within a performative code. But we cannot deny the effect this has on the person and the group. When we say that theatre transforms very deeply we refer to this space of the laboratory in which the performer, before producing a stage creation, goes through a profound work involving the most intimate layers of their essence. Starting from that new sincerity, truth and sometimes suffering, creation begins. We create from sincerity, we consider it vital that the seed, the foundations of the actions (which will then become scenes) must be anchored to a moment in which the person-performer reveals something new to themselves, makes a new effort to connect with depth and from that depth the possibility of establishing sincere and deep connections with others opens and re-emerges.

The group is witness to this collective and personal change, and the new bond is based on this collective vision of a profound transformation.

This is what allows the creation, in a few days, of a new tribe; this is what allows the creation of a show in so few days. Once the performer-person recognizes that first of all “magic” is taking shape within them, they can only be confident, they know that things can change. Because yes, things can change, but a great effort is necessary. To paraphrase a song by the Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez, I would say that we dedicate ourselves to the impossible, because enough is already known of the possible. The reality is that the impossible becomes possible, if we desire it and if we dedicate ourselves to it constantly and lovingly.

During the days of work, we created structures of physical actions, collective dances, polyphonies, and choral scenes. We created rhythmic and physical structures starting from the proposed texts. Subsequently, as craftsmen of words and action in movement, we began to cross all the materials, to put them in sequence, to create scenes.

The work took place partly in the room and partly in the Campo

I remember the first time the participants arrived at the Campo dei Giganti. We asked everyone to leave the cars at the end of the road. We got out and asked to turn off the phones and cross the space together, but in complete silence.

We wanted the space to be able to reveal itself and speak. It is the first encounter that leaves a strong mark in memory because living beings can recognize the frequencies of places and places the frequencies of living beings.

Campo has a special energy: it contains a historical, geological, water, biological, energetic memory and many other levels. These are stratifications that today architects who practice evolutionary design manage to measure with instruments, analyze scientifically and subsequently put into resonance.

In recent years I have been lucky enough to be able to count on the advice of the architect Grazia Lopedote of Polignano a Mare (Bari). The sharing of her studies and interventions has enriched with new contents the research that together with Gregorio Amicuzi we carry out on the memory (or memories) of the body, offering us the possibility to enrich our strategies of approach to spaces and communities with content, and scientifically corroborating our experiences and intuitions regarding the energetic alignment of space and people.

Thematic dimensions

At Fiumicino airport, on one of my last trips to Italy I had bought the magazine Internazionale and in the middle of the page there was a huge photo of a field full of olive trees with hearts on fire. They were olive trees burned under the command of the Israeli army. Those images had made me think about the identity of the Mediterranean and the land.

In the following weeks I had undertaken the search for a new song to bring to the Boncore meeting.

Every time I ask students to prepare a song to share, I also choose one to transform it into a collective song.

A week before leaving for Salento I asked Ali Alsamra, a volunteer for the European ESC program at LIRT, to advise me on a song dedicated to olive trees.

Alì brought me several possibilities, but I was impressed by the melody and the words of Alyadi, a song known in Lebanon and Palestine. I spent an afternoon studying the song with him and especially the Arabic phonetics which is completely unknown to me.

I write this because this time, this desire to bring a Palestinian voice to our banquet of memory, all this is written in the memory of actions, in the vocal intention and in the real intention that, as actors, we hide as a secret code behind the form of the actions.

Nothing is lost, for this reason it is necessary to choose in a balanced way and establish some prerequisites in the pedagogical and creative process.

When the encounter in Boncore began, during the work sessions, I shared the song with the group and adapted it to be able to sing it in 4 voices.

We tried and tried the song also among the majestic pines at Le Fattizze. One day Giovanni arrived, a friend of Cosimo, a boy who in a few days would leave for Palestine with the convoy of the world march organized by civil organizations from all over the world. He arrived very excited. Is it a Palestinian song? – he told me – Yes, Giovanni. – I replied.

The group learned the song, without understanding a word of the text that I kept secret until the last day. The beauty of mystery is also part of the process that leads to creation. We resonated in the phonemes, looked for phonetic similarities to remember terms unknown to us… but basically we were talking about what had brought us there.

The song spoke of olive trees, of secular olive trees holders of memory. Olive trees planted by ancestors and which are the symbol of a culture and an identity that wants to insist on life and resist death and extermination.

When on the last day I translated the text to the guys, some cried. The deep truth of those words had resonated in us even before our minds were able to understand their sense, the energetic vibration of those sounds had already told us everything… and deep down each of us knew it.

Giovanni saw our show and cried the whole time. At the end of the show he told me that there with him was the head of cultural activities for the Italian caravan. They asked me if we could teach them the song, they would sing it during the journey of the world caravan towards Palestine. My heart tightened.

This song gave a new dimension to the dramaturgy and the theme addressed in the final show. The group projected itself towards a dimension not only local but global in which the attack on nature is a symbol by now increasingly eloquent of an attack on humanity and an improper exploitation of resources that generates uncontrollable damage. But although the earth absorbs and contains this memory, on the other hand, thanks to its extreme wisdom, it is capable of putting into practice self-healing processes. The earth is capable of making blooms of plants explode that have the task of harmonizing.

Also to this we inspire ourselves when we do theatre; we detonate creative processes that put into action energetic reconversions that benefit the person, the space and the community.

The show or the materialization of the collective dream

On the evening of the final show there were many of us, in addition to the group of artists who had followed the training there were many special participants.

Gidio Fasano who played the accordion and accompanied the text of an actor;

Cosimino, who sitting under a tree spoke of the importance of defending the land and the trees and of supporting these actions by investing the funds used for armaments;

Andrea who in front of everyone covered an olive tree with lime, just as for 4 years Ulderico and the people of the village have been doing every six months;

Simone Franco who in a mirror created a balance of boulders and then sang and performed ancient shamanic rites making them dialogue with the lamentations of Calimera;

Sandro who worked the stone together with a group of 8 children and a very young tambourine player from Boncore;

Silvia who addressed her words to a tree, addressing it as if it were a man now dead;

Stefania Puntaroli who created a plastic installation creating eye-leaves, an invitation to expand our gaze;

Maestro Toni who gave us the opportunity to suspend a sculpture created by him among the branches of an olive tree: a beautiful woman carved in an olive root;

A beautiful girl who rode a wonderful white horse bareback.

At the party there were many people of all ages. They followed the traveling show with much participation and welcomed the work with more than thunderous applause.

At the end of the show we all spent a convivial moment together.

Everyone was there.

(1) Maristella Martella is a dancer and choreographer from Corsano (Lecce); she is a master of Mediterranean ritual and choreographic dances and is the president of Tarantarte. Martella is among those who have revived the tradition of Pizzica in Italy.

(2) In the 1980s, Porto Selvaggio, a location in Salento, was the scene of struggles against building speculation, culminating in the murder of Renata Fonte. Renata, a local councillor in Nardò, strenuously opposed attempts to build in the area—a protected natural site—defending it from Mafia interests linked to construction. Her death in 1984 was recognized as a Mafia crime, directly linked to her struggle to safeguard Porto Selvaggio.

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.