FRISCURA

“Going out to friscurare” in Sardinia means going out to get cool in the hot summer evenings. A ritual
minimal but ancient that begins with taking a chair to position oneself outside, on the sidewalk or at the
side of the road, ushering in the time of day dedicated to sociability. A shared ritual that
helps to strengthen relationships within communities through the exchange and confrontation of
experiences, memories, opinions and emotions and that also contributes to the oral transmission of culture
folk, a traditional heritage articulated between chronicle and history, between ancestral narration,
everyday events, practical skills and mythical local legends.

Cenzo Cocca was inspired by this dying ritual for Friscura, an installation that has the
chair one of its pivotal elements. By transferring this element of home to the outdoors, in fact, one inhabited
temporarily a common space thereby accessing the social life of the community. Tea
chair thus becomes a symbol of connection between individuals, of friendship and participation in the same
codes.

Centuries-old practice of weaving bonds and relationships, made of slow time and archaic words, formulas
dialect swallowed by oblivion, of listening and silences in which memories and suspended thoughts echo, to the
which is opposed by reflection on our time, dominated by speed, obsessed with synthesis – of
words and thoughts – in which the personal relationship has often (perhaps too often) been replaced by the
virtual or the mediation of a social profile. These empty chairs inhabited only by the words
that abandoned Cocca embroiders so that they will not be lost forever, leaves open the reflection
on the dynamics through which contemporaneity builds its relational fabric, on the
value of time, on the spaces we really inhabit, on the meaning we give today to terms like
friendship, community, sharing.

Barbara Pavan