MAGIAE NATURALIS
Number 22 in Piazza dell’Arancio is transformed for GIUNGLA Remix into a jewel-box theater inhabited by the works of Josse Renda. Not an exhibition, but a narrative journey that leads into the artist’s sensibility—fragile and powerful, light and profound—like a line that carves into matter or a word that sparks vision.
Renda’s research begins with the encounter with Giovan Battista della Porta’s physiognomy of plants, discovered in the Cesare Bicchi Library of the Botanical Garden of Lucca. From there arises an ideal dialogue with the 16th-century playwright, scientist, and alchemist, and with his most astonishing work, “Magiae Naturalis” —a world-book begun by its author at the age of fourteen, which over the centuries has woven together science, magic, and imagination, foreshadowing the wonder and contradictions of modernity.
Renda takes up this legacy and reworks it through artistic practices and speculative dramaturgy workshops, such as the one conducted with the students of Liceo Classico N. Machiavelli in Lucca: a journey that, between historic classrooms and natural science cabinets, generated self-made tarot cards, words, marks, and sheets to be drawn upon. Fragile and precious objects, capable of opening breaches in reality and restoring the dimension of the ineffable.
His research does not stop: it continues through pilgrimages across Italy, Germany, and France, in dialogue with museums and scientific institutes, in search of traces, relics, and wonders. Thus, from the Museum of Natural Sciences of Naples, he receives an unexpected artifact—an enormous animal calculus, almost like a work of art—or lets himself be enchanted in France by Charles Perrault’s fairy tale “Peau d’âne”, translated into Italian by Carlo Collodi, where the boundary between science and magic dissolves in the power of storytelling.
Through all this, Renda’s work is never mere collecting, but transformation: each gathered fragment—a stone, a leaf, a scrap of paper—becomes alive, speaking, transfigured into an artistic gesture. It is a practice of poetry, an act of enchantment: giving voice to matter, returning to the world the sense of wonder received from it.
As Milan Kundera writes, the poet belongs to the “lyrical age,” that youth which questions existence without ever exhausting its questions. Renda inhabits the world in this way: with a lyrical gaze, with an inexhaustible curiosity that transforms daily accumulation—notebooks, doodles, notes, online sharings—into a visual and poetic alphabet. A serious game, contagious, like that of a child building his own world through play.
His works, gathered in this theater-exhibition, are invitations to adopt the same attitude: to see with lyrical eyes, to cross the jungle of images and things, to be astonished by metamorphosis. To enter, finally, his “Magiae Naturalis”: an intimate and enchanted encyclopedia, where science and magic still join hands.
Weekdays:
4:00 – 8:00 pm (closed Mondays)
Weekends/holidays:
10:00 am – 1:00 pm | 4:00 – 8:00 pm