The silence of the righteous (2022)
Exhibition-installation at the Imperial Basilica of Santa Croce al Chienti (Marche, Italy)
Art has a duty to become flesh, memory, and a walkable space when history veers into cruelty. This monumental installation arises from a civic and emotional urgency following the Bucha massacre (Ukraine, 2022), yet it expands into a universal philosophical reflection on the vulnerability of existence and the profanation of everyday life.
Across the long white canvas that cuts through the Basilica’s nave like a cold ribbon of time, the flow of life is abruptly severed. An overturned bicycle with spilled groceries is no longer a mere object, but a freeze-frame of a shattered destiny, the symbol of an everyday life that will never return home. The white rags evoking the bound wrists of civilians before being summarily shot, the undergarments bearing witness to the horror of sexual violence used as a weapon against women, and the metallic rain of hundreds of spent bullet casings become the artifacts of a violated humanity. The work does not seek to show war in a literal way; it seeks to show what war leaves behind after the passage of man, which is silence, matter, traces and absence.
In the background, closing this secular altar of grief, stands a monumental, life-sized vertical figure. This figure does not represent a specific person; it is the vulnerable body of humanity itself. Created in the darkroom by directly exposing the shadow onto photosensitive paper, this large rayograph foregoes the lens’s filter to become pure contact and an anthropomorphic essence. It is a secular shroud, the shadow that outlives the flesh, a silent and immanent testament to violence, suspended between the raw reality of the earth and the ancient, sacred space that shelters it.
Text by Luce