Marostica, April 5, 2084

"The cannon has torn the sky! The cannon has torn the sky!"
The anti-hail cannons, once symbols of human ingenuity, have become the cause of an unprecedented catastrophe. A strange blast echoed through the cherry-covered hills, and the sky began to crack open. Thousands of glowing fragments broke off from the heavens, falling to the ground in a rain of burning shards. Now the sky is a chaotic mosaic, and scientists watch the scene in shock. The fragments are being collected among the blooming orchards.

In a near and imagined future, a man-made sound breaks the sky. The invention of anti-hail cannons — a technology born of superstition — explodes across the cherry hills and causes a cosmic fracture: the sky falls apart into glazed ceramic pieces and stylized stars.
The exhibition Per sentito dire (which can be translated as “By hearsay”), a title the artist Giulio Polloniato chooses to repeat and reflect depending on the context, collects and displays the remains of this impossible event. Five “starred rags” made of refractory ceramic, arranged like ritual cloths or geological remains, lie along the chapel's columns. A sixth touches the edge of the well, as if the water could return the sky’s image. At the center, a painted majolica — a pictorial version of photographs taken in the woods of Marostica in 2020 — shows the presence of the anti-hail structures: metallic cones, silent monuments to a technical gesture that failed.
The tension between imagination and flawed technology, between memory and belief, is at the heart of this work. As in the tradition of speculative fiction, the invented story becomes a way to reflect critically on reality — in this case, a soundscape that has been violated. The sound pressure of the cannons, in fact, decreases rapidly with distance, until it becomes just a quiet snap in the heart of the clouds. No real effect — only the repeated use of a technology that has turned into myth: a kind of knowledge passed on not because it works, but because it comforts.
By collecting pieces of sky and turning them into ceramic, Polloniato performs a ritual of failure and a care for the ephemeral, giving it physical form. The sky becomes shards, and the firmament hardens into broken fabric. As in the “mineral skies” of Roger Caillois or the “disconnected pieces” of Jannis Kounellis, the material absorbs the weight of time and human error.
The work also touches the ideas of chemist and philosopher Isabelle Stengers, who said that “every technology is also a way of living in the world.” The anti-hail cannons are not just devices: they are epistemic gestures, performative acts showing a distorted relationship with the non-human — a kind of hostility disguised as agricultural protection, a sound war waged against the clouds.
Per sentito dire becomes an archive of remains and superstitions, a mosaic of fragments collected from the ground and arranged like relics of an event that perhaps never really happened. Ceramics — with their double nature of fragility and strength — preserve the memory of an impossible sky: a firmament that is no longer watched, but listened to — or rather, imagined — through stories passed down over time, closer to legend than to fact.

And yet, between the weight of the material and the lightness of the tale, a space for listening remains: the space that opens when the noise stops and one is left alone, under a broken sky, trying to measure the distance between what we believe and what really happens.

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ARTISTS 

Giulio Polloniato