In Sicily, in Belice Valley, a land that in the last forty years has been the crossroads of peoples and cultures, privileged and favoured place of meetings, dialogue and exchange between «artists, architects, musicians, poets, farmers, artisans, workers, women and young people», is celebrated the union, somewhat atypical, between a winery and a cultural institution, one of the most important of the Mediterranean, generating new “FermentiContemporanei”.
Tenute Orestiadi is a project born thanks to the impulse of the Orestiadi Foundation, based in Gibellina in Baglio di Stefano, also rebuilt after the earthquake, and CantineErmes. The purpose is to promote the artistic and cultural Mediterranean heritage. Tenute Orestiadi moves in this direction valuing one of the oldest Sicilian traditions, the wine and winemaking, considering it as an important and distinctive identity of the island.
Thanks to the cooperation between the Foundation and Tenute Orestiadi borns this “ SENSORY SPACE “ , which involves taste , touch, smell, sight and hearing takes visitors to a new experience that amplifies the knowledge.
In the muffled silence of the barrique cellar, immersed in the suspended time of the slow evolution of wine, contemporary art finds a new temple: the Barriques Museum. This venue is bringing to life a new project: the first permanent contemporary museum of art in an active barrique cellar in Italy. The initiative, immediately shared and supported by Rosario Di Maria, the Sole Administrator of the Orestiadi holding, came about following a workshop held by our Export Manager, Alessandro Costantini, and Stefano Pizzi, Chair of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brera, which combined wine culture with that of the Visual Arts. As a result of that experience a number of renowned artists, but also art teachers and students of the Academy, were invited to create round paintings which were then later applied to the barriques.
Today the active heart of the cellar is an area of conservation and documentation in the making that is forming an innovative path within the museum experience. The barrique cellar becomes something different, full of magic, because it is the place where flavours are decanted and poetics and feelings find their place. A daily stage upon which the formality and the linearity of a museum blend with the simplicity and the rituals of the wine.