The exhibition, conceived in 1996 by Fabio Cavallucci and Sergio Bettini, has been curated by Arabella Natalini since 2002. From its first year up to today, Tusciaelecta has invited more than fifty artists to visit the towns involved and design works for the territory whose objective is to build a meaningful relationship between specifically created works of art and the host area for which they were created. The resulting works – heterogeneous in terms of their processuality, design and poetics – cross the aesthetic sphere in the more conventional sense, going beyond the social dimension, not only with their presence on the sites, but also through their exchange with the public and local productive energies. If, in fact, one of the main purposes of an art project developed in the area is to achieve integration between the work and the place, the relationship with the area, in the broadest sense, is the condition needed for this to acquire meaning and value.
In line with this premise, in the 2002/2003 period, Tusciaelecta involved the area extensively, avoiding placing the works in spots that were evocative but often private and distant from daily life, and instead concentrating on exhibiting in some of the hubs of the individual communities, sites singled out in the piazzas and main streets of the sponsoring towns. This “shift into the centre of the town” has inevitably and programmatically led to exhibiting to a wide public, starting a possible relationship not only with those who habitually go to exhibitions and the numerous tourists who visit Chianti, but also and primarily, with the local townspeople. Therefore, the intent is to create site-specific works for social exchange, communication and landscape, conceived as interference in everyday life, that could, with their presences, offer alternative images to those stereotypical ones of the “picture postcard” Tuscan landscape, drawing people into active and heterogeneous experiences with the art.
