DURACINQUEMINUTI — The Metasymposium

Many years ago, a small constellation of artists, musicians, wanderers, friends, and temporary inhabitants gathered for a stone-carving metasymposium in the hills of Collecorvino, in the province of Pescara. The place was known among us as Crowin’ Hill: a rural house, half commune and half creative shelter, set in that inland Abruzzese landscape where olive trees, dusty roads, improvised tools, and unfinished conversations could all belong to the same afternoon.

Crowin’ Hill was not a formal institution, nor a polished artistic residency. It was more like a living organism: sometimes chaotic, sometimes generous, sometimes absurd, but always alive. People came and went, stayed for a few days or for longer stretches, brought instruments, stories, dogs, unfinished projects, bottles, sleeping bags, ideas, and a certain appetite for living outside the strict geometry of ordinary schedules. It was one of those places where the border between work, friendship, art, and daily survival became beautifully blurred.

At that time I was frequenting the place regularly, and for a while I also lived there. I met many different people there: sculptors, musicians, travellers, and people who simply happened to pass through at the right moment. There were olive trees to harvest at the right season, and that was no romantic postcard: harvesting olives is hard, repetitive, physical work. Still, there was something deeply rewarding in it. The area between Collecorvino and Pianella is strongly connected to olive oil production, and living there meant becoming part, even briefly, of that agricultural rhythm. It felt anachronistic in the best possible way: a temporary return to hands, soil, food, weather, fatigue, and shared meals.

This short movie documents one of those moments: the Crowin’ Hill Metasymposium, which took place during the first week of September 2012. I remember it as lasting about a week, perhaps even more. Memory, like old magnetic tape, sometimes stretches and warps; what remains clear is the atmosphere. Stones were being carved, people were moving around the land, conversations were multiplying, and music appeared naturally, without announcements or stage lights.

The soundtrack of the clip is almost entirely live. Much of it comes from the spontaneous playing of Giulio Scocchia, whose trumpet gave the whole scene a strange, luminous, almost ceremonial quality, and Marco Firmani, whose acoustic bass guitar grounded the jams with a warm and physical pulse. They were not “performing” in the conventional sense. They were simply there, among the sculptors, letting sound grow out of the same dust, gestures, jokes, and improvised rituals that shaped the event itself.

I took an old camera, pressed REC, and started moving around. Nothing was planned. No storyboard, no proper crew, no second take, no ambition to make a clean documentary. It was an unconventional, unplanned, unorthodox piece of video shooting: drifting from faces to objects, from stone dust to instruments, from cats to cars, from the absurd to the tender. The result is raw, unstable, colourful, and sometimes psychedelic — very much like the day itself.

There were spliffs, beer, food, wine, and the kind of long conversations that seem to make perfect sense only while they are happening. Looking back, the whole thing carried a strange echo of the 1960s: not as nostalgia, not as costume, but as a small and genuine outbreak of flower-power spirit in rural Abruzzo. A few people, a few stones, some music, a camera, and a shared belief — even if only temporary — that art did not need permission to happen.

The title DURACINQUEMINUTI comes from a true story told by Giulio during the event. It was a story about acids, perception, duration, and the elastic nature of time — and yes, a fragment of it appears in the short movie.

Some stuff lasts only five minutes.
At least so they say…

The movie is divided into eight sections, following the loose and surreal progression of the metasymposium:

1. Location
2. The Fridge
3. A Bogged Car
4. Black Kittens
5. The Phoney Caller
6. The Couch Sdong
7. Trip Suite No. 1
8. Tuning Pegs

Every sound in the video was recorded live through the camera’s internal microphone. No studio reconstruction, no post-synchronised soundtrack, no clean audio illusion: just another old VHS-quality homebrew movie by - yours truly - Milletgrain, rescued from the archives.

My heartfelt thanks to Sergio Ciaccio, Francesca Ciaccio and Carlo Di Costanzo for everything: for the place, for the hospitality, for the spirit of Crowin’ Hill, and for making that temporary constellation possible.