Soon after its creation, the Fondazione Lac o Le Mon acquired a wonderful old building with a large piece of land located on the border between San Cesario di Lecce and Cavallino (in the South-East of Italy), which they renamed the Casa Cafausica (The Cafausic House). Today, this site is the headquarters of an experimental center for the arts, based on self-led education and the following principles:
Activities within the Fondazione take place primarily as workshops, featuring readings, theoretical and project-oriented discussions, where knowledge and new ideas are exchanged, and where all participants’ attitudes and proposals are elaborated and made use of collectively.
The Fondazione offers participants the option of living on site and making collective decisions on how to share spaces, time, resources, practices, dreams and visions. This is firmly rooted in a belief in the possibility of conceiving and experiencing forms of living and of independent communities based on sharing, rather than individualism and competition. To this end, the Fondazione promotes the attribution of value to what is already there, rather than a consumerist search for the ‘new’. It seeks to foster forms of knowledge built together and the spiritual richness that each individual can offer others, rather than celebrating personal successes as measured by one’s economic status or media coverage.
c) Practical and experiential knowledge related to the Casa
The Casa Cafausica’s architecture and landscape are such that, in addition to seminars, workshops, events and meetings, residencies inevitably involve forms of attention, collaborative practices and sensitivity towards the attributes and the needs of the Casa. In other words, we always aim to bring together the language of knowledge-production or artistic research with the place which participants are actually inhabiting. The Casa Cafausica is a place that is dedicated to achieving its self-sustainability from the point of view of energy consumption, as well as a “zero-waste” operation and biodynamic principles applied to its land.
d) Multiplicity and trans-disciplinarity
In such a context, the figure of the artist is that of a social agent who, rather than accepting a pre-determined role as belonging to a specific discipline, constantly questions roles and disciplines themselves, and who makes of this questioning a main aspect for artistic research. The Fondazione promotes all forms of relation and collaboration among artists from different fields, including visual art, dance, theatre, music and so forth, as well as between artists and professionals from different fields, who will be invited to explore the margins of their own usual activity with the aim of unveiling unexpected possibilities.
We believe that the Casa Cafausica can become a place in which both different passions and passionate differences are welcome and experienced together. The structure itself of the house, its dimensions and layout, the relationship between inside and outside spaces allows, as if by magic, for unexpected forms of cohabitation, of collaborative projects, of osmotic movements between disciplines, ways of knowings and competences.
