The 2025 edition of Nola’s Festa dei Gigli, an intangible heritage of humanity and the beating heart of Campania’s tradition, ended with a wave of emotions, applause and popular participation. Amid the eight imposing obelisks carried on the shoulders through the streets of the city, the Ortolan Lily, this year’s authentic artistic and symbolic protagonist, shone with special strength.
Its covering, signed by the Neapolitan collective cyop&kaf, conquered the square and the public, leaving an indelible mark in the memory of this edition. An intense, layered and meaningful work, capable of combining the deep history of the Festival with a contemporary, vibrant and universal visual language. The project was previewed at the City’s Historical-Archaeological Museum, directed with extraordinary dedication by Giacomo Franzese, who once again transformed the museum into a living space of culture and discussion. The Lily was created through collaboration with master engraver Vittorio Avella and the skilled craftsmanship of Bottega d’Arte Tudisco, a guarantee of excellence and rootedness in the territory.
At the center of cyop&kaf’s artistic concept, the key words chosen by the committee – land, roots, identity, sustainability, participation – took shape in a visual narrative dense with symbols and references. “For years we experienced the festival as spectators, immersed in the crowd, captivated,” said Roberto Carro, co-founder of the collective. “Being an active part of this ritual today, feeling its breath from the inside, has multiplied the magic. An all-encompassing experience that we will not forget.”
With this intervention, cyop&kaf fit into the prestigious vein of “artist coverings,” traced over the years by great masters such as Mimmo Paladino, Perino & Vele, and other protagonists of contemporary art. Their Lily was more than a decorative work: it became a participatory visual narrative, a collective gesture that involved the eyes, hearts and memory of an entire community.
Attached we publish the artists’ letter, in which cyop&kaf recount the creative journey, symbolic choices and emotions that accompanied the birth of this extraordinary work. A valuable document to fully understand the artistic and human value of the Ortolan Lily 2025-an edition that will go down in history.
NATURE NOT INDIFFERENT (of Cyop&Kaf)
I recently saw a film called Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries. It is an impressive, encyclopedic triptych on things we too often take for granted: animals, plants, stones. The middle section in particular, the one devoted to the plant world, puts the unstoppable power of plants before our atrophied eyes. Over the unfolding images, the voice of a botanist serenely explains to his students that humans yes, will disappear from the planet – in all evidence sooner than we want to be told – but plants no way, they will expand inexorably, despite everything. Plants protect themselves, intertwine. And then seeds fly, true effective wanderers, from place to place, putting down roots even if that place should be called Hiroshima.
Perhaps I was also pondering these things as I proceeded with the sketches for the lily that the Ortolan Festival Committee has given me the honor of designing for the 2025 edition of the Nola Lilies. If the point of a corporation is to protect its interests, I thought, the primary interest of an ortolan can only be to protect his primary asset: the land. Because it is the engine of his economy of course, but, let us never forget, especially because that land is the support of our being in the world, literally. Besides, no corporation like the Ortolan is as archaic as it is contemporary. This brought up signs for me that, in their apparent simplicity, point to complex issues that we can no longer-any of us-put aside.
In the various floors of the party machine (I like to imagine them as circles!) you will find a community that protects its resources, respects its fellow human beings. A community that works forgetting the drudgery but is aware of the time that gives it no respite, demanding sudden change.
A community capable of building entanglements (perhaps the machine here becomes a metaphor) that can support that swirling ascent to the kingdom of heaven or, more modestly, act as mulch that preserves the ground beneath one’s feet. The path is difficult, the forest is dark, yet nature is not indifferent.
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