Comunità
Oratorio di San Rocco (2024)
Site-specific Installation — Solo Show
Teller & K. Crespina Lorenzana. 14 September — 1 December 2024.
A ten-metre raw canvas fills the nave of the Oratorio di San Rocco in Crespina, a plague-votive chapel built in 1632 whose seventeenth-century frescoes were uncovered only in 2008. During the opening and throughout the exhibition, visitors entered through a small side door — the main entrance kept closed. No overview, no distance. You entered already inside the work, before understanding what it was.
A gathering of driftwood structures stands on the floor: timber recovered from shorelines, each piece carrying its own history of displacement, assembled with deliberately visible joints. At the centre, a black gesso mortar holds purple hibiscus powder, its pestle carved from a sea-worn branch wrapped in raw hemp rope. The gesture of grinding, of sharing, of transformation made tangible. The act of construction is part of the work.
Then the canvas. A flat surface — a painting — that invites you to cross through it. Behind it, the space changes: quieter, more intimate. On the original stone altar of the oratory sits a pit-fire ceramic bottle with two necks, one taller, one lower, made by Erika more than twenty five years ago, before they met. A bottle ready to be filled and drink together. Two presences in one form. The domestic space, the familiar space, held inside the work.
Further in, on the beam that holds the canvas taut against the wall, a small marine fossil, a rare mollusc formation still holding its original mother-of-pearl, sits almost hidden. The time when these Tuscan hills were seafloor. The driftwood of today meets the sea that was here hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The more you explore, the further in you go.
Only later, with the main door open, the full scale of the canvas becomes visible from outside, monumental, intimidating, a painting that fills the entire chapel arch. A different encounter. Less invitation to enter, more wonder at the threshold.
"Only a conscious human act can build community. Like these pieces of wood, each individual carries a history of journeys and transformations. It is the deliberate act of joining them, of building visible connections, that creates the space of welcome." — Teller & K
Sound design by Giulia Costantini: the sonification of water drops, evoking simultaneously ancestral caves and the source of life. Part of the Wild Commons project. Presented in collaboration with Odeporica and UNIRSM Design as part of the 20th Giornata del Contemporaneo, promoted by AMACI.
Over three months the installation became a living space. A group walked through it by night on a mindfulness route through the village. A class of ten-year-olds from Fauglia entered and described what they saw: fossils, transparent threads, galaxies, trees with leaves of different colours. Each a different image of community. Six months later, next spring, the children came back to exhibit their own work in the same space.
Finissage, 1 December 2024
On the last day, the fossil and the bottle were gathered into an old wooden chest, collected years earlier in Rome, at the beginning of their artistic life together, and carried out of the oratorio. What remained was the canvas, the driftwood, the mortar.
About Teller & K
Teller & K is the artistic practice of Daniele Tabellini and Erika Gabbani. Based in Crespina, in the Pisan hills, since 2006, a choice they describe as an act of creative resistance. Their work moves between installation, performance and drawing, exploring the boundaries between open systems and artistic intervention, between digital and analogue, between individual and community. Their work has been presented internationally, from the MAM Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City to the MIS Museu da Imagem e do Som in São Paulo. Their current research focuses on the relationship between community, wild commons and new forms of contemporary ritual.
Poster
Credits
Artist: Teller & K (Daniele Tabellini, Erika Gabbani)
Sound Design: Giulia Costantini
In collaboration with: Comune di Crespina Lorenzana, Associazione Odeporica ETS, UNIRSM Design — Università degli Studi della Repubblica di San Marino, Nasonero Studio
Images
2000–2026© Daniele Tabellini and Erika Gabbani / All rights reserved except where otherwise stated. / Tutti i diritti riservati eccetto dove specificato diversamente.