Contemporary Art Museum in Mammola.

The MUSABA is a park of contemporary art settled in the heart of Calabria.

 

 

 

It is situated exactly in Mammola, in the province of Reggio Calabria, a small village on the Ionian side of Calabria but facing inside between Serre Calabresi and Aspromonte mountains. Mammola is famous as Borgo dello Stocco (the hamlet of Stockfish) which is the traditional dish, cod fish worked by natural drying without the use of salt.

 

 

The Park Museum of Saint Barbara was designed by 2 artists, Nik Spatari and Hiske Maas, and it is settled along the Strada di Grande Comunicazione (The Road of Great Connection) which starts at Rosarno and finishes in Roccella Jonica, joining the Tyrrehenian Sea to the Ionian one. You live already a great experience driving along this road, because you are surrounded by the majestic mountains of Aspromonte National Park covered of a green forest. What wonderful view!!

 

 

The Musaba is a place so typical and unique. It is an open air museum in a park around the old Saint Barbra Monastery dates back the 15th century and it is 7 hectares wide, with a section in the bed of the Torbido stream. As you park your car, soon you are deep in a coloured atmosphere of the park museum.

 

 

It was founded, as I told before, by the couple of artists Nick Spatari and Hiske Maas, partners in their work but also in their life. He was a Calabrian, painter, sculptor, architect and craftsman. She is Dutch, draftsman and painter, but, above all, a manager. After having lived in Europe and North of Italy, they decided to stay in Calabria to realize this project. Now, unfortunately, Hiske is alone, because Nik passed away in 2020.  

 

 

From the exposition area with some paintings made by Spatari, we walk along a long hallway which lends us to the ruins of the former Convent of Saint Barbra. Here we are surprised, completely astonished by a beautiful depict, 14 metres long: it covers the vault and the apse representing the Giacobbe’s dream. In order to realize this work of art, Spatari invented a new technique: the silhouettes were cut out of thin wood sheets, painted and then applied creating the three-dimensional effect.  It is considered the Calabrian Cappella Sistina.

In the centre of the cloister is a big iron sculptures long 15 metres which represents a thin man called The evening shade. At the exit we met another building which is the former Saint Barbra railway station. 

 

Art and colour in an Extraordinary Calabria!

Brunella Brusco