I fumi della fornace

For the sixth consecutive year, “I fumi della fornace”, the poetry festival organised by the Congerie collective, returns to Valle Cascia, taking place from August 22 to 25 under the artistic direction of Valentina Compagnucci, Giorgiomaria Cornelio, and Lucamatteo Rossi. Eden Kotting’s manifesto inaugurates this sixth edition, dedicated to the theme of “conversion”. Conversion is understood as the rebirth of a place, the cultivation of that movement which transforms Valle Cascia into a continuous workshop of experimentation, alliances, and ecologies of imagination from across Italy. Conversion as a perceptual revolution, a different way of seeing what once seemed merely “everyday”. Conversion as that single tear that runs down the wall of despair, ferrying us towards other, as yet unimagined worlds. Conversion as a turbulence of continuous acts, as a juxtaposition of relationships, of proximity, of fields of forces and conflicts. Conversion as imaginative contagion. Conversion as “a stormy motion that traverses the dense waves of the masses”, that stormy motion which allows Bianca, a character from an unforgettable story by Gertrud von Le Fort, to be the last at the scaffold, the figure who reminds us, once again, that “the human is not enough”.

I fumi della fornace
Valle Cascia, Macerata
August 22 – 25, 2024