designed for Borderline Arte Festival
art residency, 2023
Varallo (VC)

Speculum Mundi
site specific installation _ Sacro Monte, Varallo (VC)

A kinetic sculpture welcomes the visitor who has walked all the way to the top of the Sacred Mount of Varallo - Daumal's Mount Analogue, Jodorowski's holy mountain. The Sacred Mount is made of 44 chapels with real-size sculptural representations of the life of Jesus Christ. A journey where visitors are called to be actors and spectators at the same time.

This sculptural mirror is composed of fragments of real world, represented world, reflected world, alternating in continuous mutation that is the dance of reality, creating short-circuits between reality and its representation, dialoguing with the surrounding landscape and with light. The spectacle is Platonic on the metaphysical plane, yet Débordian in the frantic social and television images that bombard us.

The sculpture is a tribute to the history of the Sacred Mount of Varallo and to the symbolic meaning behind it, that of being a mirror of a mystical phenomenon (lit. féno-mena i.e., that which has made itself seen, made itself sensible). It is intended as an invitation to find a contemplative dimension in the hypnotic re-configurations of matter. But also a call to reconsider the substance of an age of materialism and disillusion, that holds illusion and spectacle as its hallmark.