At Sa Mandra, art is not an accessory element, but a language that dialogues with tradition and territory. Within the company there is a space dedicated to contemporary artists, an intimate and collected place where forms, colors and materials interpret Sardinia with new perspectives.
This environment stems from the desire to enhance a creativity that has its roots in the island’s culture but at the same time looks beyond, welcoming influences, personal journeys and visions that tell of a Sardinia in motion. The exhibited works, ranging from painting to sculpture to material installations, offer an original reading of Sardinian identity: an ancient, solid identity, yet capable of inspiring contemporary interpretations and experimentations.
Art at Sa Mandra thus becomes a bridge between past and future. The rooms dedicated to artists are an invitation to observe the territory with different eyes, to grasp its deepest suggestions and to discover how creativity can renew and enrich the cultural narrative of the island.
Those who visit Sa Mandra find here an unexpected experience: a place where the agricultural soul and the artistic one coexist in harmony, where the beauty of ancient gestures meets the sensitivity of today’s authors. It is a journey that completes the company’s vision and reflects its commitment to preserving, interpreting and sharing Sardinian culture in all its expressions.
Cenzo Cocca - June 2021
Walls delimit, close, draw boundaries. They expand, raise barriers. They restrict spaces. Often they shelter, protect. Soaked with earth, mud, water, they breathe and transpire. They absorb, preserve intimacy. They are witnesses to everyday life, with their growth and decay. They are pregnant with moods, they become innervated with corporeality.
They are witnesses to traces, signs, dynamics, exchanges between entities that feed in spaces that are never empty. They tell of a changing and dense vitality. They suggest an elusive plurality of things, an incessant flow of thoughts, emotions, encounters, clashes, bodies that brush against each other, avoid each other, touch each other, merge.
They devour the senses that disperse and resurface in an invisible interiority. The walls are soft, they bounce back the life that in an eternal chase, passes, goes away.
Telos is born from an urgency, from a necessity. That proper to fabrics, to come out, to show themselves. To abandon drawers and fragrant chests. For too long, well folded and stored, they have shared the darkness. They crave light. They bloom again.
They remember that before being telos, they were fields of cotton, hemp, linen. They are sheets, towels, cloths, dishcloths, rags. They have fringes, lace and trims. They have tears, holes, patches. Uncaring, they flaunt their time. They defend intimacy. They preserve unconfessed desires. They guard dreams. They imprison thoughts. They protect fragrant goodness. Rough and coarse, they disguise distant origins. Between the warp and the dense weave, they intertwine memories. Between the folds they release voices.
They reveal flaws, imperceptible defects. They protect. They are a primordial shelter. They adhere like a second skin, smooth and soft. Sos telos return a soft embrace, they narrate stories of identity and belonging.
With needle and thread Cenzo Cocca sews landscapes. He joins points, builds geographies. He intercepts interconnections. He uses the backstitch, the fly stitch, single and double soft stitches. He uses the overlock and works densely to prevent the fabric from fraying. He forgets the basic stitch, small and regular, which should not be seen. He uses the satin stitch, ties energies. He forgets technique, the discipline of sewing gives way to fantasy, follows the flow of forms, captures languages. His stitching is material. They are sutures, scars. They exude lesions. They graft, connect. They have soft colors. Blue explodes, captures azure. Yellow softens. Brown, blue baste color fields. Graffiti, signs, transform into words. They suggest actions, invite to touch, to listen, to search. They soften tears, smooth the future. His threads are not labyrinths. They are short circuits, points of a network that connects worlds. Tactile Braille language, it flows between the fingers. The gaze scrutinizes, concentrates, gets lost, captures clues, builds scenarios, small views, a vase, a flower. The energy of a ray of light, solid, consistent, like the closing stitch. Final point of every seam that encompasses weft and small knots in the eyes of the thread. Stable, secure, the needle’s progress sews. Ganglia, diagrams, graphic stimuli of beats, of breaths that pulsate in unison and imperceptibly connect boundaries resurface.
Time makes no noise, gives no sign of its speed, flows in silence, without stops. Time flees, flies, tightens. Time can be lost or killed, but not stopped. Time is consumed. Space is not truly empty, it renews itself. Time softly fills space. It inhabits it. This soft room is full of thoughts that cross the mind. It is memory of objects, of used things, of sighs, of voices that run and chase each other. It has a window and a door that face the world. Out there the clouds chase each other, the stems turn green and wither. You can hear the muffled steps of life passing by. Mario, Rita, Maria Grazia, Joan, Francesca, Michele, Fabrizio, Adrian, Giuseppe, Andrea, Cenzo, Silvia, Giovanni. Names, nouns that define identities. But countless are the entities that fill spaces. Idioms, physiognomies. Memories that encrust the walls. Voices that nest between the folds of sos telos. Moods that hover. Swarms of colors, grains of dust that stand out in the reverberation of light. They coexist, ally with time and space. They are a slow breath. The soft wall is a white, bare space, where to sit, be caressed, embraced. An aesthetic space, a concrete place where to abandon oneself, participate in a cathartic rite. To reclaim time and thoughts that in this peace rustle, purify themselves, become tangible and ephemeral, almost unknowable.
The large kitchen, with walls covered in gleaming copper pots, the fireplace in one corner and the oven in the other… Behind the kitchen stretched the cellars and warehouses for the immense harvests of wheat, barley, oil, and all other varieties of fruit and vegetables… Fresh grapes, pears and apples, raisins and dried figs… the small cheeses… in the corners nuts, hazelnuts and almonds were piled up, — on large tables were arranged great quantities of cheese and provisions of lard, salami, sausage, ham and lard preserved in earthenware jars… dried tomatoes, red and oily fragrant with basil, and dried olives and other fruits and vegetables, in olive oil…
Grazia Deledda, Fior di Sardegna, 1891.
The texts are curated by Stefano Resmini, as is the curation of the installation
Andrea Cocca, known as Cenzo, is a young Sardinian artist. Born in 1994 and originally from Ghilarza, in the province of Oristano, he currently lives and works in Olmedo, in northern Sardinia.
In 2015 he began his training as a fashion designer in Nuoro. During his fashion studies he experiments and becomes interested in Art as a self-taught artist and thus begins to combine tailoring with art itself.
It is from this union that the first works are born, hand-sewn, and the first portraits. His Art is expressed through simple techniques and materials, such as needle and thread; portraits, moments of everyday life, abstract thoughts, phrases and small sewn installations are distinguished.
Another material used is playing cards, with which he literally “plays” in his own way, creating small stories for free interpretation by those who observe them.
Cenzo 3487971920 cenzococca@gmail.com Stefano 3351354143 stefanoresmini957@gmail.comCenzo Cocca / Mario Saragato - December 2021
Things persist in remaining mute.
Without touching anything, without changing
the place of objects: a syntax
in which silence strives to prevent
a touch that awakens this
still sleeping body…
(Joan-Elies Adell)
The soft wall – Telos is an empty space where time hovers. It is a place to pause, sit, look, touch or simply let oneself be embraced. It is the fabrics that speak, that tell stories. It is the diagrams, the short circuits, the beats, the signs, the scars, the sutures of Cenzo Cocca that intercept thoughts. Many have been the bodies that have softly inhabited the space, have tickled relationships and absorbed emotions. Many have been the passages that have borrowed a habitat and changed geographies. Now from the ceiling colored cubes lightly serpentine. They have four sides, as four are the walls of the room. An intricate cocoon of threads. Primordial refuge of senses, of bodies that scrutinize, inhale, manifest, appropriate silence, brush against each other, bump into each other, make noise, spread odors. Open, the side at the back allows one to glimpse a labyrinthine dance of threads, of naked senses; free is the space below, it welds to the floor pregnant with earth, invades and becomes one with the room. Footprints, forms, words illustrate the exterior, serve Cenzo to communicate thoughts, states, ways of being and appearing. They have no name, no address these primordial and complex places of dwelling; they welcome, enchant and invite meditation. Concrete on the walls are the images of Mario Saragato.
Photography has the power to speak in its incomparable silence. It communicates without disturbing. It has its own voice that creeps under the skin, invades every cell. It needs a complicit, gentle gaze, attentive to deciphering obvious, underlying codes. Two solitary slippers still preserve the warmth of those who wore them. You can perceive the shuffling of steps, the incessant bustle that devours daily tasks. Corridors that open onto living rooms, kitchens, corners of lacerating intimacy. Empty tables, full of invasive furnishings. The fire of an economical stove heats the sparse and solitary lunch. Clean washbasins, draperies, solitary the switch, geometries in the stairs. Windows that illuminate known external horizons. To dwell is to dig, rummage, fill, store, expose, hide, bring to light; it is an incessant coming and going between the bottom and the surface. Objects that unconsciously describe the action of showing and being. It is time, insistently present in the silent images and, it appropriates the gaze. It makes it roll in search of identifications, references and consoling visions. The essentiality of removing suggests unmistakable presences and recalls to things, people, atmospheres always known. There is a residential affinity between the inextricable tangle of impulses that occupy and free themselves in the abstract and colored cubes of Cenzo and that nomenclature of silent objects that define a clear and decipherable syntax of stolen images, which Mario’s attentive eye subtracts from reality.
Text and curation by Stefano Resmini
Mario Saragato was born in Sardinia, the place where he will probably die. His production begins in 2011 with the publication of the book Sputeremo sulle vostre tombe dedicated to the world of ultras. His works address different themes: from chess (Zugzwang, 2012), to weaving (Un battito e poi il successivo, 2013), passing through projects of a more intimate and personal nature characterized by particular attention to research photography (Io lui lei, 2014; Un giorno lento, 2015; Cinque giorni imbecilli, 2016; Sa petta su sambene sa molte, 2017; Non ho tempo, 2018). In 2019, after publishing with Chiara Cordeschi the book Tetralogia dell’amore perduto, he creates the Museum of Lost Love in Aggius. In 2021 he creates the Museum of Doodles.
