He is often called “the farmer artist.” Yet beyond the protective stillness of the ploughed fields surrounding the countryside of Frosinone, Mario Velocci (Ciavaito, Frosinone, 1949) has built a singular artistic universe where sculpture, sound, and landscape enter into continuous dialogue. His work moves between material presence and invisible vibration, transforming objects into sensitive surfaces capable of preserving memory, time, and human experience.
For the 150th anniversary of Corriere della Sera, Velocci presents Notes of Words, a work conceived as both sculpture and symbolic instrument. Created for the Corriere Art Collection, the piece stands as a threshold between history and resonance, between the physical trace of writing and the immaterial dimension of sound.
The work belongs to Velocci’s celebrated cycle of “Sound Sculptures”, hybrid forms that evoke musical instruments while transcending their traditional function. In this case, a six-line musical staff becomes the space through which the masthead of Corriere della Sera and the dates of the anniversary are inscribed, not as decorative commemorations but as living marks of a collective consciousness sedimented in the memory of the country.
An Artist Between Earth, Sound, and Ritual
Living and working in rural Lazio, Velocci has long cultivated an artistic practice deeply connected to nature, rhythm, and the symbolic dimension of matter. His sculptures often suggest archaic tools, ritual objects, or forgotten instruments, suspended between anthropology and abstraction.
This connection to the land is essential to understanding his work. Far from urban systems and dominant artistic trends, Velocci has developed an autonomous language rooted in slowness, repetition, and listening. Sound, for him, is never simply acoustic: it is memory, vibration, testimony.
In Notes of Words, language itself becomes resonance. The newspaper’s title is transformed into score, archive into rhythm, information into a physical trace capable of enduring beyond the immediacy of the news cycle.
A Sculpture That Resists Silence
Velocci’s work reflects on the human need to leave traces behind: to narrate, preserve, and transmit experience across time. The sculpture thus becomes more than an object, it becomes a form of testimony, a gesture against disappearance.
“In Velocci’s work,” writes Gianluigi Colin, curator of the Corriere Art Collection, “memory becomes vibration and sound becomes a form of resistance. His sculpture reminds us that every act of narration is also an attempt to resist silence.”
The result is an artwork suspended between poetry and archaeology, where the visual rhythm of the pentagram evokes not only music, but the fragile persistence of collective memory itself.
A Collector’s Edition Between Physical and Digital
Starting Tuesday, Notes of Words will be available in a special collector’s edition featuring a QR code that, through the Corriere Art Collection app, grants access to the digital version of the artwork.
The project continues the dialogue between print and digital, material and immaterial, reinforcing the idea of the newspaper not only as a vehicle of information, but as a cultural archive capable of generating new artistic forms.
Through Velocci’s vision, the page becomes sound, sculpture becomes memory, and testimony becomes an enduring human gesture.