art

Capannelle

What’s left after a horserace? After the protagonists have gone by, urgent on bodily or driven beneath the whip. After the rumbling of hooves announces their coming before our eyes can see them.
A new sound that the mind immediately recognizes, like an echo from the past, from the days when horse and man fought and lived together. What’s left after a horserace? What’s left is the roar of the crowd, joy, a few mumbles curses, tired, exhausted animals returning submissively to the paddock. What remains are men mounted in their stirrups, drained by exertion and pre-race saunas, with grim expressions or wry smiles on their faces. A gust of wind over the grass turf of Capannelle Racetrack and the ritual starts all over again, with other participants, other thrills.. and yet that unique moment is a labor of years, and of lives. We have gone out looking for those lives, starting from a trail left on the grass that the next race will obscure and obliterate. We’ve walked backwards down the road that leads from starting gates to the stables and from the stables to the main palyers of this micro-world, which is the Capannelle Racetrack. Impressions of horses and men that we have collected, to keep them from being lost.
Massimo Reale

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Capannelle, Rome 2001