In yesterday's post we looked at the debate around an arty poster for a regatta considered as a political attack to the policies of the Italian Minister for Interior Affairs, Matteo Salvini.
You can bet that the debates will continue but will also be shifted onto other artists and works. At the moment the Interior Minister is indeed engaged in a new war and theatening to send back to Libya 177 migrants rescued by Italian coast guard ship Diciotti.
Italy asked Malta to take them, but the Maltese authorities refused highlighting the ship was not in distress and the migrants preferred continuing their journey towards Italy.
Yesterday Salvini demanded other European countries to take in the migrants and threatened to send them back to Lybia, a solution that may have legal repercussions on Italy as using the country's own ships to return migrants to Libya is in violation of the civil and political rights as assessed by the European Court of Human Rights.
As the odyssey of the migrants continues, Lampedusa is getting ready for a performance by Fabio Viale that will take place on the local beach on 23rd and 24th August.
Organised with the support of the local authorities and the Galleria Poggiali, the performance is entitled "Souvenir Pietà (Madre)" (Souvenir Pietà (Mother)) and it a development of a 2007 project, "Souvenir Pietà (Cristo)" (Souvenir Pietà (Christ)).
Both the projects consists in 1:1 replicas of Michelangelo's Pietà, but in the early version Viale reproduced Christ without the Mother and in the second and more recent version, the Mother was represented without the Son, hinting in this way at the sorrow of separation.
The statue of the Mother without the Son was also employed for the conceptual project "Lucky Ehi", presented last year in Milan: in this case the artist asked to a young man from Nigeria he had met in a refugee centre in Turin to pose in the place of Christ.
The contrasts in "Lucky Ehi" were striking: the white marble of the static Madonna statue held the living body of a man of colour, a modern representation of a suffering Christ, but at the same time a metaphor for somebody who found peace after a troubled life, while the statue became a universal symbol, a mother for all sorts of children with no distinctions of cultures and religious beliefs, an ancestral icon with a modern global power. The installation was accompanied in that case by an audio recording in which young refugee Lucky Ehi told his story and recounted how he flew from his country because of religious persecution.
The statue of Mother without Christ will land on Lampedusa's beach on Thursday this week and will be looking towards Lybia, her empty but open arms ready to welcome people, sons and daughters arriving in pain from all sorts of places, seeking love, comfort and support.
As seen in previous posts, Viale plays a lot with visual illusions, misperceptions, juxtapositions and contrasts between classical art and urban moods. At the moment Viale is exhibiting at the Glyptothek Museum in Munich, at the Battistero del Duomo and at the Galleria Poggiali in Pietrasanta, Italy, but this is the first time one of his works is presented in a very symbolic public space in Italy, in a performance that will certainly raise the debate on the current Italian policies about migrants and human rights. Will "Souvenir Pietà (Madre)" enrage Salvini, so busy at the moment with his ethnic cleansing campaign? Hopefully yes, after all that's what art should do - irritate big powers, question their decisions and prompt more people to think.
All images in this post by Nicolò Taglia
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