We curated the creative and artistic direction of Theriaké, a cultural and territorial project, through 40 Custodi: a filmic device built for contemplation. 40 Custodi is a film conceived as an archive. Forty static shots, forty windows, open onto a place suspended between nature, spirituality, and community. The gaze moves through essential, everyday fragments, allowed to breathe, given the time required to become experience. The film stems from a methodological choice: subtraction, measure, permanence. Each window becomes a form of guardianship, a way to protect an atmosphere and make it accessible without exhausting it. The image remains frontal, precise, and dry. The rhythm remains slow and disciplined, able to bring forward minimal details: a shift in light, a fabric moving, a presence crossing the space.
The materiality of Apulia becomes a visual language: white stone warmed by the sun, olive trees moved by the wind, water caraffe on a rough table, a candle placed in an empty room, pale textiles swaying outdoors. The film moves through the day, from dawn to night, as an invisible and natural cycle guided by the light. The landscape transforms into an emotional architecture: essential, tangible, intimate. Sound enters the image: wind, birds, fire, water, silence. The soundtrack remains real. At times, a distant voice emerges: a discreet presence, a trace of continuity, a sign of the future. A form of life that appears and disappears, like a soft reminder.
The windows are numbered from 1 to 40, like pages in a book: gestures of order and ritual. At certain moments, short lines in dialect appear, left in the film like a breath of wind: they open imagination, they leave space. The dialect enters as the place’s sonic material, living memory, and closeness. 40 Custodi marks a new beginning: a visual and sensorial foundation on which Theriaké can build upon: research, community, hospitality, for a long time.
