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Time is Out of Joint
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HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World
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Franco Vimercati. The World in a Grain of Sand
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Libro morto: la mostra
04/05/2023-21/05/2023
Libro Morto (Dead Book): the exhibition, showcases a selection of photographs from the Dead Book performance, that was conceived and directed by the artist Paco Cao.
The exhibition project is the outcome of a process born out of the ideation of the performance, which was initially presented in 2016 at the library of the Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx (New York) and reproposed in the evocative setting of the Nymphaeum of the Museo Nazionale Etrusco (National Etruscan Museum), the place where the Premio Strega (Strega Prize) the most important event involving books and the whole Italian literary community has been held since 1953.
The artistic action, conceived by Paco Cao as a sequence of ritual actions with eschatological value materialises in the representation of the death sentence of a book – Il museo della vittima (The Museum of the Victim), a novel by the same author published by MV Editions in 2009- which is hacked to pieces with a chainsaw and subsequently buried during the reading of a prayer in its memory.
Libro morto, contrary to what it may seem, is not an explicit denunciation of censorship but rather a reflection on the book as a fetish, put in a dialectic relationship with violence and in particular with nature that is involved in the production of the book itself.
Through praying, the burial of the volume and a ritual of restitution and reception, there is an attempt to reconnect with Mother Earth, often exploited to the exclusive benefit of human beings.
Dead Book-Prayer
We bring it back to you, Mother Earth,
from whom we received it.The roots of the tree howled when they lost their trunk,
which, sacrificed to make the pulp,
was transformed into paper that joyfully received the trace of slick pigment.We bring it back to you, Mother Earth,
from whom we received it.
But just as when you delivered it to us, you did not forfeit it,
we will not forfeit it either when we deliver it to you.The undesired death of the tree blessed the birth of the book
that today lies dead, devoured by the ravenous, oblivious saw.
Who has caressed your spine, smelt your entrails, oh, dead book?
Those who read you shall perpetuate your existence beyond your death.We bring it back to you, Mother Earth,
from whom we received it.
But just as when you delivered it to us, you did not forfeit it,
we will not forfeit it either when we deliver it to you.Mother Earth: prepare a place in your welcoming womb
to receive this dead book.Libro Morto is a work by Paco Cao
Grazie a Mario Daniele Alonzo e Adriano MuraPaco Cao uses a wide range of disciplines and materials and his work establishes a strong relationship between art, audience and context, challenging the boundaries between high and low culture. His projects are often developed over long periods of time, crossing geographic as well as cultural boundaries.
His work has been exhibited and/or made in collaboration with, among others, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Museo del Prado, at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Biennale Mercosul (Porto Alegre, Brazil), Museo Carrillo Gil (Mexico City), MART (Rovereto), Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Rome).
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