The Ballad of the Clocktower (2015-2023)
Book, 145 pagesA bitter litany of failures.
An account of the collaboration between APSNINFA-ETS and the Municipality of Copertino in the management of the Clock Tower in Piazza del Popolo, focusing on the actions of the Municipal Administration and the officials responsible for the related bureaucratic and technical procedures between 2015 and 2023.
Sold out.
At the expiry of the agreement governing the use and management of the Clock Tower in Piazza del Popolo, the President, on behalf of the members of APSNINFA-ETS and the partners involved in the project, considers it necessary to place on record the Board’s position regarding the management of the Clock Tower during the period 2015–2022. This statement reflects the association’s interpretation of the events.
While reiterating the decision not to renew the collaboration with the Municipality of Copertino, it should be recalled that in 2015 the Clock Tower was made available to our association free of charge, at no cost to the community, under a formal agreement registered with the Italian Revenue Agency.
In return, the association undertook to develop the site through the creation of a cultural centre on the first floor of the Tower and a broader programme of non-profit socio-cultural activities serving the local community.
In September 2017, serious administrative shortcomings came to light which, in the association’s view, were the responsibility of the Municipal Administration and the relevant technical offices. The Clock Tower had been made available to our association without the necessary authorisation procedures having been initiated, preventing the local Superintendence responsible for the protection of cultural heritage from issuing the required authorisation.
This serious situation led to the forced closure of the Clock Tower for an extended period, delaying ongoing activities and creating a real risk of their permanent interruption. Despite the disagreement of the majority of members, the Board decided not to take legal action against the Municipality of Copertino and the local Superintendence, although such action could have been pursued to protect the association’s financial and reputational interests.
The Board considered that legal proceedings would have brought the project to a definitive end and jeopardised the work of everyone involved.
To avoid penalising the community for the actions of a few, it was decided to accept the situation, despite a profound sense of injustice, sorrow and dismay at what had occurred. The decision was also influenced by a certain compassion for the administrative and technical representatives, whose evident embarrassment was matched by their difficulty in offering any plausible explanation for these serious shortcomings.
These feelings were further aggravated by subsequent press reports concerning more serious events involving some of the municipal officials responsible for the relevant technical procedures. Whatever these events may or may not have revealed about the broader management of public affairs, they confirmed for us a fundamental human and professional incompatibility that made any further fruitful collaboration impossible.
Therefore, having gained a clear sense of the administrative judgement and managerial competence of our institutional counterpart, and with our trust in the main project partner now eroded, we decided to focus on what remained within our control: our work. The initiative continued temporarily in other venues across Copertino, thanks to the network of local partners who had enthusiastically joined the project and enabled us to honour our commitments to collaborators, funders and the community.
Over these seven years, despite having been deprived for long periods of the spaces intended for its core activities, the New Clock Tower of Copertino (TOC) continued its work, organising dozens of artist residencies, developing partnerships with public and private institutions, universities and national research centres, and drawing the attention of the local, national and international press and a broader public.
The TOC project brought a public asset abandoned for decades back into active use. In doing so, it employed six people on permanent contracts, engaged more than 30 local professionals and workers, and channelled approximately €300,000 of public and private funding into the Copertino area. All funding was fully accounted for to the relevant funders. The total investment was approximately five times greater than the expenditure originally required under the agreement with the Municipality.
The Tower premises, which had been handed over to us in a state of severe neglect and deterioration, were cleaned and reactivated through experimental research into parasitic and non-invasive forms of interior architecture. Developed with internationally recognised professionals in partnership with the Department of Architecture of the University of Naples Federico II, these interventions were conceived to adapt the space without permanently altering the historic structure.
The project received a €10,000 award from MiBACT and Fondazione Unipolis for its socio-cultural innovation and was also recognised at national level for excellence in the enhancement of historical and artistic heritage.
It should also be noted that the local Superintendence, adhering to what we regarded as a particularly narrow interpretation of the relevant administrative procedures, ordered the removal of the architectural interventions carried out in the Tower. Our association was then fined for “unauthorised works and damage to public property” — an assessment difficult to reconcile with the national recognition previously awarded to the same project for excellence in the enhancement of historical and artistic heritage.
Thus, the Clock Tower had already undergone a rather troubled history: built in the late nineteenth century, it partially collapsed in the late 1960s and was subsequently reconstructed without anastylosis; its only 30-square-metre room was used for decades as a pigeon loft; a questionable concrete intervention followed in the late 1990s; and the building was eventually abandoned once again. Against this history, it is striking that the activities which brought the Tower back into use were later deemed to have damaged it — the same activities for which the project had previously received national recognition for its contribution to the enhancement of historical and artistic heritage.
As a final illustration of the attitude we encountered from the local institutions, an official document was later prepared by the local Superintendence in connection with the statutory protection of the Clock Tower. Remarkably, its account of the building’s historical and artistic significance contains no reference whatsoever to the TOC project, as though seven years of activity, intervention and public use had left no trace in the history of the place. For us, those years constitute not only part of that history, but one of its most significant contemporary chapters.
As though a single, hastily drafted document — whose language itself left much to be desired — could erase the work carried out by our collaborators or the recognition the project had received. The President also considers it worth placing on record that, throughout these years, not a single representative of either the Municipality of Copertino or the local Superintendence attended any of the activities organised by TOC.
This was despite repeated invitations and extensive coverage in the local, national and international press documenting the progress of the project.
Our activities were not even considered worthy of inclusion in the Municipality’s end-of-summer programme. This programme was usually crowded with hastily assembled festivals whose cultural value, when compared with our own work, would no doubt have lent further prestige to our activities — had they only been considered up to the required standard.
The President reiterates his profound disapproval of those responsible for the management of public affairs and still in office at the time of writing. He nevertheless expresses the hope that the community will in future choose representatives capable of recognising and developing the full potential of their territory.
Such representatives should have the will and competence to manage technical collaborations without disadvantaging future generations of professionals, who will undoubtedly continue to hope that one day it may be possible to break free from entrenched patterns of clientelism and amoral familism.
Written in Montegrano, in the month of November, in the year two thousand and twenty-three.
The Board