The New Orchestra. From Mountain Communities to Communities of the Future is an ongoing group exhibition (on view until 31 May 2026), organized by the Mountain Museum in Turin, Italy, and curated by Andrea Lerda. The exhibition explores the role of mountain areas in contemporary and future societies, presenting them as laboratories, models, and experimental grounds for rethinking community and more sustainable forms of living.
Developed through a series of artistic residencies in Alpine and Apennine communities, T The New Orchestra draws on the historical awareness that mountains-despite the challenges of inhabiting them-have long fostered encounters, sharing, and sociality, nurturing a sense of togetherness, belonging, and solidarity that urban-industrial societies have largely lost.
The exhibition is realized in collaboration with myself (Sofia Baldi Pighi), Gabriele Lorenzoni (Director of Galleria Civica di Trento / MART), and Alexandra Mihali (Artistic Director of Posibila Gallery, Bucharest). It features works by several artists, including Hannes Egger, Olivia Mihălțianu, Rebecca Moccia, plurale, Eugenio Tibaldi, and Emilija Škarnulytė. I personally curated Škarnulytė’s contribution, developed in collaboration with Organico Perduca, a micro-community based in Travo, in the Emilia Apennines (province of Piacenza).
One of the magical elements of the place is the Pietra Perduca and Pietra Parcellara, two enormous ophiolitic-volcanic rocks thrust to the surface by ancient tectonic collisions, which dramatically rise above the rolling hilly landscape visible from this small village.Thanks to the collaboration with Professor Stefano Segadelli, a geologist from the Department of Geology, Soils and Seismicity of the Emilia-Romagna Region,together with Škarnulytė we discovered that the ophiolitic rocks¹ of the Apennines had a prehistoric significance that went far beyond their geological origin. Sites like Perduca and Parcellara have been frequented since Neolithic times as ritual places and observation points.²
Attracted by these outcrops of oceanic crust, Škarnulytė imagines the so- called “cults of the peaks” – archaeological spiritual observances practiced on the summits of mountains since the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and in the Roman times – and reflects on what traces they could assume today. Through a further interdisciplinary dialogue between the artist and the archaeologist Francesco Garbasi, deputy director and co-founder of ArcheoVea, the role of Pietra Perduca associated with female fertility rites became clear.
Since 4000 BC, mountain peaks have been used for rituals, and the presence today of the church of Sant’Anna (dating to the early Middle Ages) is nothing more than yet another attempt to “Christianise” places previously dedicated to pagan cults.³
Following the ancient association between mountaintops and the divine, the artist focuses on the pools of water carved from Pietra Perduca: this water, present all year round, reflects the night sky as a mirror, evoking the use of these stones as cosmic instruments.
Interweaving geology, archaeology and myth, Škarnulytė makes a series of drawings with primordial forms, crushing minerals with earth, water and salt, thus suggesting a cosmogony of the mountain projecting itself skywards. These “lunar” drawings suggest an inversion of planes: from the Earth’s crust of ophiolitic rock to the sky, evoking an ancient vision – specific to many mountain cultures – that recognises stone as being an intermediary power between heaven and earth.
The video accompanies the discovery of the drawings, contemporary rock- art forms, and invites an unexpected familiarity with traces of an unknown culture, the “primitives of the future” as Boccioni would have said.
Škarnulytė activates an archaeological spirituality; she invents an ancestral imagery, a lost ritual towards these masses, reinterpreting the landscape as a cosmological archive, in which forgotten cosmologies can resurface and resonate through the contemporary imagination.
Note:
¹ The word ophiolite comes from the Greek ὄφις (óphis), snake rock, due to the scaly texture.
² Stefano Segadelli, Le ofioliti dell’Emilia-Romagna, Dipartimento Geologia Suoli e Sismica Emilia-Romagna, Tascabili della Geologia, 2025
³ However, the site has never been the subject of archaeological excavations due to lack of funding.
