Moira Ricci took this as a starting point for “Dove il cielo è più vicino”, her solo exhibition at the Tenuta dello Scompiglio (curated by Emanuela De Cecco). This collection of photographic and video works is a weave of gazes, made ambiguous as is customary in her work by a mix of reality, legend and fiction.

Moira, an artist from Maremma, was born and grew up in the loveliest part of the Tuscan countryside, surrounded by bare hills and the sea.

Her world is inhabited by ghosts, boar-children and stone-men, the characters in an ancestral mystery transmitted by the rural dimension. She is an ethnographer of tradition, which she always strives to contextual in the present, looking at history through the filter of the “here and now”.

Scholars of the phenomenon suggest that the so-called crop circles were inspired by this 17th-century illustration of The Mowing-Devil, partly because of the never clarified interpretation of the subject with the scythe: a demon or something else?

Ricci’s artistic approach invests this ambiguous iconography that has turned demons into aliens in far more recent times with additional meanings and references.

This is how the exhibition begins: a circle of mown wheat appears on the ground, the sun-dried spikes and enveloped in a spiral of fire. The video was filmed from above by a drone, the eye of which absorbs a huge portion of land. The land is the place and focus of this research. Land as farm, home, family and future; land marking the boundary of the universe. A suspended space, so large and incommensurable is it, melancholic and evidence of a life that is slowly vanishing, leaving but a few memories.

This warning had already been spoken by Pasolini in the 1960s, when he poured out his “anger” towards a middle-class fortified against the proletariat. Herein lies the dimension of a family devoted to maintaining and respecting the toils of past generations.

Moira observes, lives and then reinterprets this state.

Scouring the area like a sleuth, she selects old farmhouses handed over to the Ente Maremma during the reclamation period. Abandoned homes that the artist has returned to silence, eliminating windows and doors. Facades painted the colours of the earth set against a cloudy sky, manifest witnesses of a system that is struggling to survive.

The exhibition is not, however, a lament of the good times of the past. It is a flight upwards, a way out and a catalyst of ambition, desire and humanity that only conviction can make real and equally possible.

One day, Moira asked her father to help her build a spaceship. He designed it and they started constructing it together, converting an old abandoned threshing machine. As time passed, they were joined by her cousin, then her brother and her uncle, the next-door neighbour, the local policeman, friends, nephews and nieces, cats and dogs... all working together on the same mission: whether or not it was impossible mattered not at all. The film, lasting roughly an hour, illustrates this collective construction process, alternating days and nights, people and animals, work periods and moments of idleness. The film is mute. No one worries about when this spaceship will take to the heavens but all look at the sky as if to the future.

This story is relevant to everyday life, a conversation that spreads, becoming fable or myth.