Eridano, il Po

Eridano, il Po is a project by Luca Boffi, in collaboration with Piergiorgio Caserini and Camilla Romeo, for Fondazione Un Paese, and the winner of the PAC—Plan for Contemporary Art 2024—awarded by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

A journey that began in September 2024 and concluded on September 6, 2025, with the presentation of the work and its acquisition at the Teatro Sociale Danilo Donati in Luzzara. The project year was structured into four seasonal phases, each developed as a performance-based initiative called “Diorami,” during which participants were able to gain firsthand experience of floods and overflowing waters, environmental restoration sites, abandoned floodplains, and the animal species that inhabit them: from the “Diorama Autunno,” an exploratory walk through the landscape at the confluence of the Ticino and Po rivers, in collaboration with the Horti project of the Almo Collegio Borromeo, which involved forty people in documenting and describing the landscape, to the Winter Diorama, on the banks of the Mortizza Canal in the Lower Lodigiano region, where nearly fifty participants learned to set the calls of local bird species to verse, presenting them in a short opera performed and recorded on site. And then there was the “Diorama Primavera,” held within the Parma Morta Nature Reserve, where a group of fifteen people took part in a playful workshop exploring the elements of the landscape, and the Diorama Estate, organized in collaboration with the historic company NaviAndes, which took eighty people on a boat trip from the Mincio lakes to the Po River, involving local poets and musicians who perform in dialect and reinterpreting the mythical narratives that unfold along the route, which form the basis of the tourist narrative.

The result of this process is a work in motion composed of seven elements drawn from the public collection of Fondazione Un Paese: a map, a graphic notation, and a recording of the collective song of birds; a series of photographs; mud sculptures created by the participants; an audio recording on vinyl that reinterprets the myths associated with the river; a video that traces the entire journey; and the script and concept booklet that brings the performance to life. The following artists and authors participated in the project: Ines Placentia, Benedetta Fioravanti, Francesco Fusaro, Francesca Marengo, Filippo Davoli, Bianca Peruzzi, Francesco Fusaro, Claudia Losi, Emiliano Maggi, Riccardo La Foresta, Renato Grieco, Sante Moleste, Filippo Arganini, Francesco Tosini, and Andrea La Pietra.