NATURE / CULTURE
the Theme

We should recognise it as an artificial creation of culture, a defensive work that culture would have dug all around itself; because it did not feel capable of asserting its existence and originality other than by cutting all the passages that could testify to its original connivance with the different manifestations of life.

Levi-Strauss

Passing through the villages hosting the In Linea d’Aria (t/n: Air Distance) programme, in the heart of the inland areas of Basilicata, we move along the routes of the Nature/Culture binomial.

Named “natural” is anything we do not need to learn, anything that does not require action but rather an acceptance or rejection. Nature is a concept that reminds us of the pre-existing, the origin of the world, man, and everything in the universe, thinkable or not, known or yet to be discovered. In everyday speech, natural is the opposite of artificial, defining a frontier between man and the world as a phenomenon and manifestation. On this frontier, the narratives that shape man and his declinations originate and inhabit; it is here that nature becomes culture.

We are faced with an animal that creates prostheses and micro-worlds, a being that, to fulfil itself, generates artificial environments that require continual readjustment: it builds to inhabit, it equips itself to operate. In this sense, culture acts like nature, aiming to change, select and shape the environment. Culture is, therefore, a natural condition of man.