Corte Vico II San Michele

About

Where does the Mountain begin and end?

The courtyard as a space for dialogue.

The courtyard as a documentary work.

The courtyard as fiber.

The courtyard as architectural pavilion.

As every year since 2022, around Ottaviano’s patronal feast, returns the new civil rite dedicated to art and dialogue: CORTE VICO II SAN MICHELE—a true private courtyard in Ottaviano’s historic center—which offers a space to process artists’ archives and encounters with Vesuvius. And, in particular, reflects the ongoing dialogue with the Vesuvio Adventures association, based on conversations, projects, walks, and views of the mountain (as we call the Somma–Vesuvio complex).

G. Ambrosio

Corte Vico II San Michele, in its fourth edition, was born in 2022 with the idea of installing, within a real Vesuvian residential architectural space, a documentary-based work titled Ius Soli by Giovanni Ambrosio—an archive (photographs, objects, videos, papers, traces, ruins, and fragments) of the Vesuvius Red Zone, i.e., 25 towns that daily face the prospect of becoming a vast archaeological site in case of eruption.

From the very beginning, the project opened up to a dialogue among international artists, creating conditions for a living exchange between artistic practices and the local context. That first gesture made it possible to bring contemporary artistic reflection back into people’s living places. The Corte Vico II San Michele courtyard is an inhabited, shared architectural space that belongs to people’s everyday lives. Here a series of questions arose: can art relate to the concerns of those who live here daily? What does it mean to live in Vesuvius’s red zone? How do we think about where we live using artistic tools? But also, how and where do we make art outside city centers? And with whom?

Vesuvius, in its Somma–Vesuvio form, is at the center of our lives and those who inhabit this part of Campania (and, ultimately, those who view it from afar). It is a point of tension that gathers many contemporary issues: risk, disaster, catastrophe, ecological emergency, and the fragility of existence. Living here means being continuously exposed to what philosopher Luca Salza referred to as clinamen, taking up Lucretius’s term: a deviation, a push that can occur at any moment.

For 2025 we decided to think together about what the mountain is today. For us, Vesuvius is the mountain: an inhabited, fragile, and layered ecosystem, where symbolic visions, dwellings, evacuation plans, but also strategies of resistance and persistence intertwine.