A tree that has come from afar sprouts up next to the university lecture hall. It happens in Reggio Emilia. At Fotografia Europea, Circuito Off 2022, the University of Modena and Reggio evokes a world through the roots and branches of a plant in which the academic "sacred" becomes the "sacred" of peoples. Images, voices, songs, memory that proposes itself as projects for a better life.
Signals from the land of remorse: Resilient Communities is the installation conceived by the painter-performer Dim Sampaio, Brazilian-Bolognese, by Sara Uboldi and Federico Montanari from Unimore, with the soundtrack of artists such as Fabrizio Rivola from Imola and Petar Stanovic from Ravenna, opening on Saturday 7 at 3 p.m. at the ex Caserma Zucchi- Palazzo Dossetti, next to the Aula Magna. The talking tree-sculpture will remain until the end of the great Reggio Emilia photography exhibition on May 15.
It is the result of a collaboration between the Department of Communication and Economics of Modena and Reggio Emilia and the Department of Historical Sciences and Cultural Heritage of Siena.
It is anthropology and art in the field, or rather on the tree. History and future planning arise, sprout, hang, dance from the tree. In Dim Sampaio's work, images of ancient rituals that have survived, of ruins that tell of the territory and the history of the past are intertwined with roots anchored to the earth, to the ruins, testimonies and vestiges of the past. "The tree becomes a metaphor for the strength of communities that, without losing awareness of their origins, open themselves to the world and to the other." 
This is the sense of Resilient Communities, which in environmental defense seek new ways. A kind of "Laudato Sì" of Francis, the saint and the Pope, brought to the temples of culture and modernity of Padania.
The title recalls the great anthropologist Ernesto De Martino and his book "La terra del rimorso" (The Land of Remorse), 1959, in which he sought to understand the residues of archaic religious forms in the traditional societies of Southern Italy, also posing the question of forms of cultural resistance and projections into modernity. 
Sampaio works on a multimedia platform of photos and videos of the territories, starting from the maps, through their projection on screen and following narrative links between experiences, voices, ancestral practices, crises and transformations.
The south as metaphor and reality. Fabrizio Rivola and Petar Stanovic return the soundscape: songs, prayers, proverbs dialects become heritage of humanity to be transmitted to new generations. 
The initiative is a collective work of artists and populations, including the association Via Roma 0 of Reggio Emilia, connected to the project "CULTURE, WELLBEING AND HEALTH" developed by the universities in a network with Palazzo Magnani, Fondazione Nazionale Danza Aterballetto, Archivio di Stato di Modena, Biblioteca Panizzi.