BONDO – SELLA GIUDICARIE Willy Verginer’s poetics and the
theme of the Garden of Eden in the Divine Comedy meet in St.
Barnabas Church in Bondo to open a dialogue to the present.
The exhibition “The Lost Garden. Purgatory and Anthropocene,”
set up from July 15 to Aug. 28, constitutes the second stage,
dedicated to Purgatory, of a trilogy that the Municipality of Sella
Giudicarie is dedicating to the 700th anniversary of the
Supreme Poet’s death.
The exhibition engaged the Gardena artist in a site-specific
work that focuses on the dramatic lament of our garden-planet.
It is a story that has the intensity and grace of Willy Verginer,
artist of international standing (in 2017 he exhibited a large
installation on the theme of the environment at the Wasserman
Gallery in Detroit, Michigan) who maintains his workshop-atelier
in Ortisei, in a close, necessary and existential relationship with
nature and the Alpine landscape. The place that hosts the
exhibition, the church of San Barnaba, has been hosting
different languages of art in its Baroque architecture for years,
with a growing role in the context of Trentino’s exhibition hubs.
The idea of a path of growth in virtue, central to Dante’s
Purgatorio, is translated in the exhibition’s path into a reflection
on the present, marked by the man’s increasingly unsustainable
impact on the Earth, to open a gap in the now widely prioritized
debate on the subject of the Anthropocene. The exhibition
project approaches it from an artistic perspective that stages the
contrast between human gazes, immersed in the virtual and
technological world, and a questioning nature represented by
the animals carved in wood by Willy Verginer, removed from
darkness and brought into light in a moment of centrality.
A current theme is that of climate change, that causes
landslides and disorients Homo sapiens, used to thinking of
themselves as the center of creation. Thus the silver-colored
man in the center of the aisle, sculpted by Willy Verginer with a
colorful headdress formed by an array of cell phones covering
his view, makes clear the disorientation of a society unbalanced
in vision by the multitude of screens it frequents and inhabits.
A man shielded from reality and distracted by mental zapping
on different screens, in the illusory indexing of his own
paradises. A man who has forgotten that he is only a part and
not the whole, removing the dramatic truth that if the garden-
planet dies, identical fate befalls the one who inhabits it. The
sculptor Willy Werginer’s profound knowledge of alpine nature
enables him not to fear the disruptive encounter with consumer
objects, inseparable companions of our lives. Indeed, in the
very play of contrast with the products of technological society,
in this case cell phones, a spontaneous feeling of alliance with
nature and nostalgia is released.
The same nostalgia from the garden of delights, wonderful
place in the Old Testament hosted Adam and Eve before the
disastrous fall into the world of toil, which Dante places on the
summit of Purgatory, the metaphorical end point of the
exhibition, with Verginer’s animals above the candelabra, in his
garden of Eden. Exhibition choice that is upwardly structured
and suggests that to progress towards the best in us, as in
Dante’s Purgatory, the path is uphill. An image that takes on a
present meaning: are we not called to the challenge of radical
balance, certainly lost, with our garden-planet? “Next to the roe
deer, the donkey, the raven, the bear, – writes curator Roberta
Bonaza in the catalog published by Vanilla editions – there is
room for the last remaining specimens of the Amur leopard, not
more than fifty; for the Sumatran elephant, one of the most
endangered species on the planet; for the polar bear, which can
feel the ice melting under its paws; for sea turtles, who mistake
plastic floating in the ocean for food; and for the Javan
rhinoceros, perhaps the rarest large mammal in the world. ”
The pink hat covering the gaze of the man sculpted by Verginer
is the hat that we all wear. An object that we honor every day on
the altars of our contemporary times and that the church’s own
side altars offer us in its breakdown.
A theory of cell phones, glittering and repetitive, that loses
polish over time, fading into a gray, tragic hive, where there is
no trace of the industriousness of bees and their sweetness.
To see in the open field, we must remove ourselves from our
beloved screens and accept the challenge of the real,
rediscovering the preciousness of our gaze and the courage to
climb our purgatory, changing habits.
There is a need to get on the road: no longer a going down, an
indolent and passive letting go, but a consciously and actively
working for our planet, rediscovering the perseverance of the
working donkey and the breath of the running deer. A path that
is taken starting first of all from a strong willpower, from a desire
for harmony. A patient step, instead of the magical touch on the
display. Willy Verginer, capable of sensing the substance of
things and stripping it of all superstructure, traces a path that
invites resistance. The sculptures that the artist has dedicated
to this adventure, by their presence propose a way.
