GAIA -The origin-
GAIA -The origin- 2021
International Contemporary Art exhibition
March, 26 - April, 4 2021
Concept edited by Vanessa Viti, graduated in Visual Arts and Art Curator
“I am going to sing to the Earth, universal Mother with solid foundations, venerable old woman, who nourishes what is on the surface of it. From you comes fecundity and fertility, O Sovereign !,and it is from you to give and take life from mortal men. Blessed is he to whom you, kindly, honour;he has everything in abundance ... august goddess, generous divinity! Hello, Mother of the Gods, spouse of the starry sky! Grant me a happy life as a reward for my singing!From now on I will remember you in the remaining songs.”
(Homeric Hymn)
What would man be without the ability to think and ask questions? The most ancient civilisations have given us a gift, not only of answers, but also of wonderful stories in which to be able to discover the mysteries of the world. In ancient Greece it was said that at the beginning of time there was only darkness, a sort of black hole, which the Greeks called Chaos: an endless abyss where nothing is defined and where the concept of order does not exist. From the Chaos emerges Gaia, or Mother Earth, she is a distinct, solid, visible and tangible form. Gaia represents the primordial idea of cosmic order and balance. It will be Gaia herself to generate Uranus, the sky, creating the first principle of absolute balance, a sort of double that stands out above her and completes her. The concept of Mother Earth belongs to many ancestral mythologies; different peoples, in different places, with different names have revered the parent of every living being: Gaia for the Greeks, Tellus for the Romans, Joro for the Norsemen. To incarnate the archetype of the divine, in the most ancient cultures, it is always a female being, since it represents the mystery of birth. If on the one hand the divinity of Gaia has been honoured, venerated and invoked through pagan rites, there are few artistic works dedicated to her and that have come down to us, after all -from the Middle Ages onwards- artists have turned their look to Christian representations. Somehow it will be Gustave Courbet in 1866 to remind us that "the origin" is a feminine noun, when he represents in an impeccable way the vulva of a woman and entitled the work "The origin of the world". This is the time to pay homage to Gaia, bypassing territorial, cultural and religious limits and borders, because we belong to Mother Earth, we owe our life to her, and we will return to her at the fulfilment of our days. Life and death merge into a single mystery, opposites that find balance in the depiction of Gaia, as the one who gives life at the same time welcomes the death of her children in her own womb. "She gives and she takes, She rules until the end of time, She goes her own way", it is with these words that the band Within Temptation speaks of Mother Earth, in the song of the same name. Gaia walks her path freely, every living being instead seeks that same path -because as much as history and contemporary life distance us from her- we cannot escape the indissoluble bond that exists between us and Mother Earth. The artist's role is to evoke emotions and memories; through the production of works of art he is called to dig into the most intimate and ancestral memory. The time to pay homage to Gaia is ripe, the right way to reunite and consolidate the connection with her is precisely art. Artists of all times have shaken souls and thoughts, they have moved peoples and cultures, now is the time to recall primordial memories in people and to invoke Gaia. If Mnemosine (or memory) is the daughter of Gaia, art is in some way the daughter of Mnemosine because it has always been the first tool used to preserve memory itself. The "Gaia: The Origin" exhibition aims to retrace history through a series of works, both figurative and abstract, and to bring back sleeping or hidden feelings, intimate and perhaps forgotten emotions. As Gaia represents a sort of splendor, so it wants to be the exhibition promoted by M.A.D.S.: a glow that makes thoughts and emotions explode. With this project M.A.D.S. asks artists to arm themselves with creative ingenuity, to find the right colours, get rid of any iconographic scheme to give life to new and infinite representations of Gaia.
