OSTUNI
Giovanni Ozzola
The Lake of Unknown
Carte Blanche
Curated by
Virginie Puertolas Syn
Puglia Art Project
17 – 19.07.2026
Performer Enza Consoli
Video by @fabio_mantegna
Puglia Art Project invites three international contemporary artists to respond to the specificities of the region, its layered history, geography and fragile, luminous environment. Each artist has been given carte blanche, complete creative freedom to conceive a site-responsive work rooted in the elements that define Puglia: the sea, the trees and the stones.
Giovanni Ozzola will present a new work in Ostuni, continuing his exploration of light, space and perception. Alongside Ozzola, the third edition of Puglia Art Project features Beatriz Morales in Ceglie Messapica and David Rickard in Carovigno, each developing a new site-responsive work in dialogue with the territory and its distinctive landscape.
Puglia Art Project is curated by Virginie Puertolas-Syn in collaboration with Copperfield (London), Galleria Michela Rizzo (Venice and Milan), Suburbia Contemporary (Barcelona), Dep Art (Milan and Ceglie Messapica), Galleria 32 (Carovigno) and Giuliana Schiavone.
The Lake of Unknown by Giovanni Ozzola will give life to an exhibition within the exhibition, a process in transformation where the work is not presented as a finished result but as a search in constant becoming. The exhibited pieces will be complemented by a new work that will emerge from a performance held on Thursday, September 18th, in a continuous dialogue between matter, gesture, and time. In the half-light of a suspended space, outside of time, a man approaches a slate stone. His hands, guided by an awareness of the material, begin to draw signs on the dark surface. Each incision is a luminous wound in the mineral night, each stroke a route into the unknown. The sound of the scraped stone fills the air, a primordial echo resonating in the collective memory. Like a navigator of the intangible, the performer follows a deep impulse, tracing paths that resemble lost maps, signs of an archaic language that seems to emerge from the earliest expressions of human consciousness. The black stone becomes witness to an obsession, to the ancestral need to leave a mark, to inscribe existence into matter and time. It is the same impulse that has guided explorers and dreamers, those who have followed the call of the unknown to the ends of the earth. Each groove is a step toward mystery, a dialogue between the hand and the memory of the earth. The performer continues, tireless, as the marks multiply and the sound of the slate merges with the heartbeat, with the breath of the sea, with the voice of those who ceaselessly search. Thus, between shadow and light, between sign and silence, the geography of an inner journey is drawn: a map of discovery and loss, of beauty and time, of the human and the cosmic.