Qui giace un fulmine caduto

Prelude
Qui giace un fulmine caduto; I repeat these words mechanically in my head. I think of ancient civilizations of uncertain origin. It is said that for a long time these people looked to the sky to know the future, observed and studied celestial geometries, cherishing the illusion of grasping the future. Rabbit-hearted as I am, I have never had such vague ambitions: I prefer a low gaze and return with my thoughts to those ancient people who, for centuries, entrusted the earth with the role of guardian of the past. It is to the earth that humanity has given its roots, and it is from these that we start to reconstruct what we are and what we have been: an endless archive of meanings to be searched for, a mass of ruins. Slag.

Interlude
From such tension between high and low, visible and non-visible, comes the thought of Qui giace un fulmine caduto; a choral exhibition that aims to reason about the role of the work of art as a universal tool for reading and understanding contemporaneity. The title itself refers to an ancient ritual – Etruscan, then Roman – that consisted in consecrating the exact spot where lightning struck the ground, a space that became a place of worship, joining the human and divine dimensions. Similarly, the works in the exhibition stand as tangible signs of an encounter between opposing forces. The creative act – obsessive, liturgical, sometimes dizzying – is configured as a device capable of telling five different stories: a sandwich in front of the sunset, fear, everyday objects, urinating in public, and the body. Through the work of five artists – Jerico Cabrera, Livia Giuliani, Flavio Orlando, Giuseppe Sciortino, and Jacopo Zambello – the exhibition, conceived as a sensitive archive, represents a wide variety of impulses, united by the choice of using a surface as a metaphorical platform or screen on which genres mix, transform and collide to help the viewer’s gaze decipher the complexity of the present. What emerges is a large map in which different places and eras can coexist, placing themselves in a suspended time and challenging the most established visual strategies.