Le ragioni di una scelta, anzi tre
The reasons for one choice, actually three Each time the Library has planned and organized an exhibition, it has involved contemporary artists, calling on them to visit and interrogate the millennia-old heritage of the popes’ book collection, to be inspired by it to give life to new projects and site-specific works.
We started in 2021 with Pietro Ruffo and the cartographic investigation, then Maria Lai and the talking books, Irma Boom with her uniquely designed volumes, Sidival Fila in a path focused on reuse, and Alain Fleischer who reinterpreted the Babel of the Library’s historic spaces.
This time the goal was to enhance the Poma Periodici collection, the three unpublished issues of En route and profiles of six Victorian-era female travelers. We realized that one artist would not be enough and that at the same time it would be nice and stimulating to devote each section to a different one, so that the multiplicity of topics covered would have an exact correlate in as many contemporary figures. Hence, the intuition to identify three different creatives, summoning them to us to interact not only with our possessions, but also with each other. A risk, perhaps, that we felt like taking, and one that, upon completion, we do not regret at all: far from it!
Lorenzo Jovanotti Cherubini, the eclectic contemporary traveler
Singer-songwriter and traveler, passionate about rhythms and melodies from around the world, explorer of musical worlds for over thirty years, he wrote: “Travel, there’s no word in the vocabulary that excites all my senses more than it. For me, the word ‘travel’ itself is a journey, it has the same effect on me as the sound it makes when I open a can for my cat”.
Kristjana S Williams, the Beatrice of Northern Europe
Kristjana S Williams is a visual artist from the faraway Iceland who works in London, where in a fully female studio, bursting with colors but using the most fragile and familiar material to us, paper, she creates highly evocative poetic landscapes. She is a frequent visitor of maps and geographic charts and a passionate admirer of the artistic expressions and iconographic motifs of the Victorian era.
Maria Grazia Chiuri, the advocate of irreducibility
The story, in a contemporary key, of the travels of six women who in the 19th century left their hometowns to travel alone, defying general disapproval and the most sarcastic skepticism about the outcome of their endeavors, has been entrusted to the creative Maria Grazia Chiuri, for whom the feminist perspective is not just another possibility, a simple option, but the deepest expression of her way of looking at and interpreting the world.