Hospitality 
Hidetoshi Nagasawa is a japanese sculptor known throughout the world. He left by bicycle in 1956 to visit new countries and came to Casarano in 1996 to take part in the exhibition “Crocevia”. Pleroma, his work, midway between sculpture and architecture, is still in Palazzo D’Elia, where the exhibition took place, left as a present to the town by the artist himself. This steel arch, set under the main vault of the palace, seems to press over the vault’s bases to reach up the ceiling. Immobility is the result of an everlasting game played by the arch and the ceiling with the help of two little steel solids set between the two of them especially to grant the balance of the first. Pleroma seems to be in aerial harmony with the space housing it.With it the artist reveals its interest, particularly in the 80’s and 90’s, to the theme of the border between architecture and sculpture and to the idea of suspension.
He also created the memorial garden of Piazza Bastianutti, with the sculpture “Le due Ali” (The two Wings) in its centre. It is dedicated to two young sisters from Casarano killed in the terrorist attack of Sharm el Sheik in 2005. It is an abstract form resembling an angel and its symbolic nature enhances the pathos of the tragic death of the two sisters, whom the square is named after. Indeed Nagasawa believes that sculpture helps to discover what eyes can not see. He also maintains an artist must find his inspiration in nature, since in it he can discover that secret energy spreading contemplative and aesthetic processes. In fact the two angel’s wings are wonderfully set inside a garden, where the artist also set, in his special way of conceiving the space, some oblong blocks of stone on a lawn, in perfect harmony with the trees already existent before the creation of the work. These blocks seem to form a labirynth resembling an heptagon if sawn from the top. In this way even the position of the observer in the garden, or his movements in it, are relevant to the general meaning of the work.
Piazza Bastianutti comes within a contemporary trend of rediscovery of the “Zen” garden, thus bringing back its author to his origins. In a sort of short circuit between human poiesis and arboreal physis Nagasawa revises the idea of “artistic place” from his very own point of view, coming to an “ecologic” idea of making art, based on the assumption that an artist must recognize and respect the features of the place where he is creating his work. Many are the garden sculptures created by Nagasawa in Italy and they all reveal how wisdom and delicate he is in mixing different elements in his art. From Sardinia to Central Italy up to Salento, Nagasawa’s art is there to witness his incredible life, the life of a travelling artist, a life made of passages and crossings, the life of an indispensable man bearing the message of how important are meetings and cultural promiscuity.