What do you fantasize about?

"What do you fantasize about?" is a mural of handmade tiles decorated with the sgraffito technique made during my art residency at Mena Fueco Studio, in Grottaglie, Puglia.

Grottaglie is a place rich in history, and is famous as a city of ceramics.
This tradition of craftsmanship comes from the richness of clay in the soil, a commodity that ancient natives took advantage of to produce everyday utensils and other ornamental goods. Grottaglie's Ceramics district is characterized by a constellation of workshops and kilns in the rock of hypogean environments, which in some cases were once olive oil mills.
Over the years, alternating generations of artisans have created innovative spaces that connect to tradition while experimenting with new forms and products. Mena Fueco is one of these realities, stimulating and contemporary, open to exchange and confrontation with international artists through an art residency program.

The main subject of my mural is a typical character of the local tradition, the "Pupa Grottagliese," which is also a typical artifact of Grottaglie's craftsmanship, decorated with frills and lace according to seventeenth-century fashion and painted in bright colors: an anthropomorphic bottle with the feminine shape but with an unexpected detail, the mustache.

According to the medieval custom of "ius primae noctis," all young brides in the village were forced to spend their wedding night with the prince. The story goes that in Grottaglie a peasant, devastated at the idea that his young wife would also have to suffer this outrage, decided to kill the evil prince. On the night of the appointment, the peasant disguised himself in his bride's women's clothes, richly adorned to attract the lord's lusts. He presented himself at the court palace, but caught up in the fury of rebellion, he found that he had forgotten to shave off his mustache. He was discovered and laughed at by the prince.

Instead, the lower part of the mural depicts a scene related to the Minotaur, a character from Greek mythology, a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull locked up in the center of a boundless labyrinth. Even more cruelly, he too was the terror of virgins, for every nine years he demanded that they send to Crete fourteen Athenian subjects, seven maidens and seven virgin maidens, who disappeared into the labyrinth sacrificed to the Minotaur.

ph. Andrea D’Aversa