Giuseppe Ducrot

Hypermaremma presents Fontanile, in collaboration with Terre di Sacra: the unprecedented site-specific work by Giuseppe Ducrot, at the Macchiatonda road in Capalbio.

On the occasion of the fifth edition of the Festival, but with a multi-year planning and design project, Ducrot created a grandiose 15-metre long and 4.5-metre high ceramic Fontanile produced by the Association in collaboration with Terre di Sacra. The work is housed in their estate, which was founded in 1922 and has been restoring and preserving the Maremma territory for over 100 years, with the aim of protecting and honouring it. It also helped to establish the Lake Burano Oasis, the first WWF Nature Reserve in Italy.

For the realisation of the Fontanile and its yellow colour, by now the unmistakable signature of the artist, Ducrot relied on the iconic Bottega Gatti of Faenza, an excellence in majolica throughout the world that since 1928 has distinguished itself for its assiduous research into innovative techniques and languages and a production rich in unique works. Despite the terrible flood that hit Emilia-Romagna in May 2023, Bottega Gatti managed to complete the production of the ceramics destined for the Fontanile with admirable timeliness, postponing the realisation of the work by just one week.

The work is the result of a study that Giuseppe Ducrot has been carrying out for years, in which he investigates technical and formal solutions that give shape to interventions characterised by colour contrasts in dialogue with the surrounding physical space. For the first time, in fact, the artist creates a monumental sculpture that does not depend on a relationship with the architectural context, but rather one that <<stands on its own>>, as he himself states, as an absolute work. Starting from the pre-existing structure of a 1930s drinking trough originally intended for Maremma cows and recently renovated by Terre di Sacra, Ducrot reinterprets the forms to give life to an architecture in its own right, inserted in the uncontaminated landscape that surrounds it and that speaks to our European historical and cultural background.

‘Fontanile’ is supported by Regione Toscana as the winner project of the open call Toscana in contemporanea 2023.