Conceived by Gianni Politi (Rome, 1986), The serpent ritual included the participation of the artists Alessandro Agudio (Milan, 1982), Andrea Dojmi (Rome, 1973), Giulio Delvè (Naples, 1984), Matteo Nasini (Rome, 1976), Lupo Borgonovo (Milan, 1985), Helena Hladilova (Kroměříž, Czech Republic, 1983) & Namsal Siedlecki (Greenfield, USA, 1986), and Renato Leotta (Turin, 1982).
The exhibition’s title is an explicit reference to Aby Warburg‘s homonymous essay, where the author underlines the importance of the psychic power of images to Native American tribes. Travels in North America afforded Warburg the opportunity to study indigenous magic rituals and the origins of paganism. It was from there, he concluded, that man derived his inherent and unconscious need to “possess” images, benefitting from their ancestral and psychic power.
The exhibited works were intended to offer the spectator the opportunity to undertake a “journey” into the symbolic cosmos of images, with the aim of affirming the value of slowness in contrast to the speed of contemporary expression. The artists involved share an interest in arriving at a practical approach to art, an idea related to the difficulty of producing something new in an era in which everything seems to already exist.
[download the artists’ profiles]
