Exhibition project for Premio Meridiana, Every Thing is All Things curated by Mario Francesco Simeone and promoted by the association Amici del Madre with Antony Morato and Fondazione Tridama
At the dawn of the modern age, the obsessive search for gold by the major European powers fueled colonial expansion and the organization of new economic systems based on the exploitation of resources and labor. In Brazil, the main gold-producing territory under Portuguese rule, the Crown exercised strict control over the extraction and circulation of precious metals. To guarantee the quinto real, a 20% tax on all gold extracted, severe measures were imposed against smuggling. One of the most common methods of evading these controls was to hide gold inside sacred images, mostly Baroque wooden statues of saints. The statues were made with a hollow (oco) body and an access door, so that they could contain and transport small quantities of the metal without arousing suspicion. This diversion was a constant feature throughout the period of colonial mining. From an ambiguous image, santo do pau oco has entered common Brazilian parlance to refer to someone who presents themselves in one way while concealing an altogether different nature.
Santa do pau oco takes its title from this expression, altering its gender to explore the relationship between surface and depth. In the works of Clarissa Baldassarri (Civitanova, 1994), Maria Luce Cacciaguerra (Palermo, 1997), and Anna Maria Maiolino (Scalea, 1942), there is a common interest in perceptual thresholds and language. The three artists explore liminal territories, each in her own way. While Baldassarri explores the boundary through sensory and spiritual transcendence, and Cacciaguerra poetically traverses it as a territory of possibility, Anna Maria Maiolino inhabits it as a place of resistance.
Having emigrated to Brazil as a teenager, trained in the repressive context of the military dictatorship, and active since the 1960s, Maiolino has put together an artistic practice capable of asserting a female political presence within a system that denied its existence. In her works, the creative gesture is inseparable from the destructive one, each form arising from a tension between opposites. Cacciaguerra’s speculative interest stems from concrete poetry and continues its principles in a contemporary research project that, here for the first time, takes on a physical dimension, bringing together art history, literature, and an extensive personal archive. Baldassarri focuses on the perceptual and sensory limits in relation to the transience of the body and time, through a spiritual practice that is expressed above all in site-specific projects involving installation, video, sculpture, and performance.
The exhibition presents a cross-cutting reflection on life and death, understood not as opposites but as coexisting forces. The three artists, from different generations, shift between similar media in their desire to question the deep structures of language. Santa do pau oco is part of the Meridiana Prize, curated by Mario Francesco Simeone and promoted by the Fondazione Donnaregina – museo Madre and Amici del Madre, dedicated to supporting curatorial research and the emerging art scene in Southern Italy. The exhibition dialogues with the theme of the first edition of the Prize, Everything is Everything, inspired by Elio Vittorini’s novel Conversations in Sicily.
