Location

73016 San Cesario di Lecce LE, Italy

+40° 17′ 59.16″, +18° 9′ 41.91

Description

A while ago, before the summer, in the courtyard at Careof in Milan, Efrem, a guy with a beard, told me he came from San Cesario: «I live on the edge of town, at lluca fausu», he said, with that sly Salento accent. I thought: «He lives in a false Luca, at Luca-the-fake… whatever.» Over the next few days, for no apparent reason, I kept thinking about this fake Luca. A couple of months later we were driving through San Cesario, Alessandra had a blue wig, it was three in the morning and we were on our way home from a party. We had ingested red wine, rum and chinotto, and I had chewed some mint leaves. «I want to show you something – she said. Have you ever heard of the lu cafausu?» I couldn’t believe my ears. Around two bends and down two one-way streets (the wrong way, she was driving) and there was the fake Luca. A dozen buildings surround what might almost be called a piazza. At its center stands a strange structure (more of an “object”) in crumbly masonry, a weird sort of pagoda with a Middle Eastern air (a crescent moon on the roof), fragile, almost an eyesore. Efrem’s neighborhood doesn’t take its name from some dishonest Luca, but from a “coffee house” (twisted by local dialect into “lu cafe-haus-u”) that has been many little things for many long decades: a gathering place for peasants, a gazebo that provided shade for noblemen and English officers as they sipped tea, a dwelling for a young orphan and his white horse, a henhouse, a toilet, a garage for a Lambretta, a sexual trysting place, a farmer’s tool shed, an illegal gambling joint, a dream object and, last but not least, the site of performances by four artists. It was and is an inadmissible spot, a territory of accumulation and absence of meaning. A metaphor, perhaps, of what we might become.

In the last three years we have been involved in a sort of aesthetic and anthropological investigation, dealing with the contradictions of both urban and metaphorical spaces, the “self-generated” beauty (by chance or necessity) and the “errata” of the landscape.

Lu Cafausu, an old coffeehouse located in a small town in the south of Italy, has become the inspiration for stories, performances and actions in Lecce, Rotterdam and New York. We identified Lu Cafausu as a metaphor for something that is, at the same time, both central and marginal, where aesthetic contradictions meet the meanings (or maybe the lack of any meaning) of our time. It’s “an imaginary place that really exists.”

Contributors – Emilio Fantin, Luigi Negro, Giancarlo Norese, and Cesare Pietroiusti