The project A passion for wheat that the Wurmkos group has created for the PAV, takes its inspiration from the world of agricultural labor linked to the rites and popular culture rooted in the area of Lucania, in the southern Italian Basilicata region. These popular rituals are polysemous and represent the symbolic moment for evading that which Ernesto De Martino calls the “crisis of presence” or, in other words, the ability to preserve in our memories the experience necessary to respond adequately to a determinate historic situation. Rituals help mankind to bear this crisis of presence that it feels when facing nature, offering reassuring models to be followed. This occurs symbolically in the implicit ambivalence of the ‘wheat harvest’ since this is an operation which necessarily both kills/sacrifices the wheat and makes it available to man at one and the same time.

The ethnographic film A passion for wheat, filmed in 1960 by the Italian, political documentary maker, Lino Del Fra, is also on show at PAV. The documentary, from which the Wurmkos project takes its name, shows us a significant cross-section of rural life in Southern Italy. In Lucania, an ancient peasant ritual was performed during the harvest period (still in the 1960s), in which the farmworkers enacted a sort of ‘vendetta’ for the death of the wheat. In order to do this, they hunted and killed a goat, the mythological animal responsible for the death of the harvests and for the period of ‘vegetable void’ (the winter). Then a woman would arrive and would be disrobed so that her clothes could be given to the fields – a highly symbolic passage of the ritual that augured a return of fertility to the fields with the arrival of Spring.

Wurmko sis an open group of people with and without mental disease founded in 1987.

For this project Wurmkos is: Susanna Abate, Adele Bressa, Elisabetta Bulgarelli, Marco Campanella, Pasquale Campanella, Caterina Caserta, Marinella Cisari, Roberta Colombo, Savino Crudele, Angela Di Bartolomeo, Isabella De Robertis, Salvatore Fede, Giuseppe Giacoia, Silvia Guerri, Pietro Marconi, Jelena Milosevic, Elisabetta Notarangelo, Mauro Panzeri, Sofia Paravicini, Patrizio Raso, Michael Rotondi, Antonio Valente.