The evocative charm of the ancient Grave of the Caves and the magic of the underground pathways awaken the most archaic part of our human memory, bringing to the surface the traces of those ancestors who sought shelter underground and among the cliffs, escaping the violence of the elements and the threat of wild beasts. In doing so, they imbued these impervious places with a primordial sense of dwelling, of hearth, of home.
In those remote times, painting served as a means of communication, enabling the transmission of fundamental knowledge and life experiences across generations. Stylized figures and amorphous faces, archetypal images, and signs—now incomprehensible to us—acted as the foundation for the earliest forms of writing and for a primitive aggregation of symbolic structures. At the dawn of human civilization, there was cave painting.
Over the millennia that followed, this painting evolved into the representation of cults, rituals, customs, and collective references. Returning to it today, reviving that archaic manifestation of art, allows us to delve deep into our psyche to rediscover the fundamental values of coexistence, to reflect on their development and representation, and to question—through the lens of the most distant past—the reasons behind our present, our advanced, technological, and artificial civilization.
It is, therefore, a remarkable challenge—one that offers a unique emotional experience to the visitors of this new ‘art manifesto,’ a journey of self-discovery set within the depths of the Castellana Caves, a place of fascination and revelation. In the darkness, light emerges: the mark, the color, the painting, the expressive power—and with them, the eternal human inclination to peer into the depths, to give voice to silence.