Stone of Venice in Monument Valley, Corpo Geologico 2016, Crescens - T.O.E. Art Market

The term “pietra” (from the Latin petra rock) does not constitute a proper geological terminology as it is a residual object coming from large rocky conformations, which originated with the cooling of the earth forming a substratum that allowed the appearance of the vegetable, animal and later human life. The stone in its static nature in fact receives in itself the scans of the time of the earth and the stones in question thus coming from these great conformations trace the characteristics of a specific environment. Over the years the artist collects and catalogs stones choosing them based on a purely personal and unconscious call. The origin of these objects and the new place hosting them trace interconnections repeated over time, revealing the artist’s origins and his personal history. The artist then performs an operation to displace the stone by inserting it into an alien environment and observing its interactions and alterations with the surrounding landscape as the movement of energy from one place to another. The increasingly important accumulation of this mineral material leads to a broader reflection on temporality, which seems to also affect the so-called “inanimate life”, motionless and apparently impermutable. Corpo Geologico is a still open project that deals with the theme of migration, identity, border and trespassing. It is an experiential archive that takes shape and grows over time. The notion of frontier has always been linked to the idea of identity and it is inevitable that it will be transposed with people and their being willing or unwilling subjects to travel, migration, and exodus. The photographic documentation present in the exhibition is a collection of each of these “actions” which were geolocated with the relative GPS coordinates captured at the time of shooting. Object in transition small stone has an intrinsic ability to be moved or removed and the placement of objects is also ephemeral and subject to further movements. The mapping operation therefore loses its positioning intent to fix, opening up different horizons, labile and without boundaries. The artist’s story is an indirect story: the great global migration phenomena carry deep identity crises that, if compared in scale, accentuate the aspect of the individual’s condition as part of a macro process that involves everyone. Globalization and immigration are interdependent phenomena: the former is often the cause of the second due to a greater facilitation of the movement of people.