RE-BIRTH

"The 'cure' for facing death is not to cling to life. It is to recognize that the time before birth and the time after death are infinite, while human life, besides being unpleasant, is also brief; it lasts the span of a moment and is as infinitesimal as a point or perhaps something even smaller and more negligible. However, historically – and at a transdisciplinary level – this convulsive exaltation is followed by a stoic resignation, which turns the thought of death into a further drive towards the creations of the spirit.

Death itself drives man to act, to deceive himself once more. Death is the very illusion, the engine of life.

In RE-BIRTH, these concepts, central to the artist's audiovisual manifestation, are taken to new heights. What at first seems to be a disturbing and unusual, at times macabre, cycle of life, later takes on meanings that invite and encourage the viewer’s reflection.

RE-BIRTH is a work born from the hybridization of a profound exploration of the relationship between life and death, and between man and fauna. The slow and burdensome emergence of the human figure from the carcass of the animal – the focal act around which the semantics of the work concentrates – presents an output that, though seemingly negative in connotation, is ultimately positive. But is this positive output truly so? Eve and Adam, who eat from the tree of knowledge and become mortal, are the symbol of this. We come from a dark abyss, and we will return to a dark abyss."

"It is not you who speaks. Nor is it merely the race within you that cries out: within you, the countless generations of men – white, yellow, black – surge forward and shout.

Free yourself even from race: fight to live the entire struggle of man. Look at how he emerged from the animals, how he fights to stand, to give order to the inarticulate cries, to preserve the flame in the midst of the brazier, to preserve the mind within the bones of his head."

Nikos Kazantzakis, Ascetics, translated into Italian with a prologue by Giovanni Bonavia, Reggio Emilia: Città Armoniosa, 1982.

TOMMASO FALOCI

Materiali: Terra Cruda, legno, calce
Dimensioni singola: 250x150x50cm
International Gabrovtsi ART-NATURE Symposium
"The Nature of the Forest"
Gabrovtsi Village
2023

© photo: Iliyana Grigorova