SASSARI - The museum as a high fashion atelier, the ethnographic heritage as a collection that pays homage to identity and winks at contemporaneity, archeology that comes to life among clothes and scattered traces of everyday life.
This is the leitmotif of "On the traces of Clemente", the exhibition with which the National Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum "Giovanni Antonio Sanna" in Sassari reopened on June 18.
Set up in the Clemente Pavilion by the Algherese stylist Antonio Marras, the exhibition will be open until June 18, 2022.
"On the traces of Clemente" was presented by Francesco Muscolino, who since last month has headed the Office of the Ministry of Culture that manages and enhances the state museums in Sardinia, Elisabetta Grassi, director of the Sassari museum, Salvatore Rubino, vice president of the Foundation of Sardinia, by the curator Antonio Marras and by Geppi Cucciari, godmother of the event. The mission entrusted to Marras with visionary courage by the top management of the museum system is to remove dust from the very concept of museum and exhibition. Result: the material donated in 1947 by Gavino Clemente, cabinetmaker from Sassari, artistic director of the family's carpentry and patron, becomes a collection of rare beauty and contemporaneity, pret-a-porter models in elegant, ultra-modern, surprising shapes and colors.The teamwork coordinated by Marras and his wife Patrizia Sardo hits the mark and strikes for originality without appearing inadequate to the context and the mission of enhancing, promoting and telling Sardinia and its history. "This exhibition manages to uniquely combine the two souls of the Sanna museum, archaeological and ethnographic," Muscolino states.
"It is a great emotion - comments Elisabetta Grassi - to reopen with this event after the close of 2018". "The fact that the closure was prolonged by the pandemic gives the event a further symbolic meaning", he adds, recalling that the "Sanna" is "the oldest and richest ethnographic collection on the island". For Salvatore Rubino, with the installation by Marras and the reopening of the museum "we breathe new air, we are finally looking ahead". Nicely admitting that she was catapulted to Sassari by the friendly insistence of Antonio Marras, Geppi Cucciari underlines that "this is how the territory is celebrated, but also a restart is celebrated with the hope that it will also involve the artistic and cultural world, the true heritage of the island ".For Antonio Marras "Sardinian costume fascinates for its extraordinary variety, for its structural, decorative, chromatic elements and for its meaning of ethnic identification". This is why "in the face of the perceived danger of a feared homogenizing globality - he says - the will to safeguard one's identity and enhance diversity as a factor of wealth and heritage to be preserved" is gaining ground.