Barch Art

Barch Art was awarded one of the economic prizes of the 2025 call for proposals.

The Barch Art project, devised by Dolomiti Hub in collaboration with Arte Sella, interprets memory in artistic form in the Fonzaso (BL) plain, through the recovery of disused barch, structures originally intended to protect hay from the rain, composed of four vertical poles and a sheet metal roof that slides into position depending on the quantity to be stowed underneath.

The project gives the barch a new role, interweaving memory with a contemporary perspective, an action of social regeneration in the broadest sense, involving people, territory, landscape and history. Thanks to the vision of ivan (born Ivan Tresoldi), they have now become art installations. Barch Art does not limit itself to the recovery of structures linked to haymaking, but turns into an action of research and telling the stories of the local inhabitants, merging art and anthropology.

By listening to the owners, the project breathes new life into these spaces with the installation of artistic works that recount and recall the everyday life, toil and tradition of the place and its vanished customs. The social enterprise that promoted the project, supported by its multidisciplinary team, has recovered the ancient daily life, snatching it from oblivion, in a portion of the Fonzasino landscape that was once rich in mulberry trees, vineyards and hay. With ivan in 2023, Dolomiti Hub kicked off its first event, the ‘Call to the Arts!’, a meeting that united the community to share memories and traditions through the poetry and performance of the artist-poet, transforming the occasion into a collective reflection, in which words became a tool to create a profound connection between territory and inhabitants.
 

The action involving the barch was not limited to the material intervention of cleaning, recovering and restoring the cycle/pedestrian paths, but helped to sow and spread the possibility of re/building links, uniting past and future. As Paul Klee said: ‘Art does not reproduce what is visible, but makes visible what is not always visible’. This project is not limited to preserving the heritage that barchs hold, but aims to bring out the essence of stories and traditions that are not immediately perceptible.

Barch Art now becomes a process that gives voice and light to what often remains hidden. The installations become a narrative work, allowing visitors to discover a place that, despite its silence, once again shows its semantics.