MUSEO DIOCESANO TRIDENTINO
Palazzo Pretorio
Piazza Duomo 18
tel. 0461/234419
crirical text by Marco Tomasini e Riccarda Turrina
In
the Dutch tapestry room of the Diocesan Museum in Trento, the profane
is confronted with the sacred on the topic of Nativity. It is a delicate
theme, since every approach of contemporary art to a religious ancient
work implies an easy judgement. The sacred must remain untouched, it cannot
undergo free interpretation, it can only be contemplated in loneliness,
while protected by austere museum rooms, isolating us from the external
reality. Nativity, though, is part of everyday life, it is a biological
process which has always been the same since the world began. Tradition
has it that Christ was born in an everyday humble environment, a cowshed.
A sacred event happening in a place which is strongly “real”.The photos
by Santi Oliveri are screened on a monitor near the arras La Nascita
di Cristo (Christ's birth). Two textures are put side by side, the
old and prestigious one of tapestry (made of wool, silk and gold) and
the modern texture of the monitor screen, a net of horizontal and vertical
lines of luminous pixels. These photos search into the present looking
for this event repeating itself every day, epitomized by Christ's birth.This
young artist has always been fascinated by urban “non-places”: stations,
airports, parks. In this anonymous and busy public areas, he frames with
a click the emotional essence of the individual. He wandered discreetly
through maternity wards in hospitals, pointing his camera on the research
of that magic halo (brought out by a bright chromatism) enveloping a child's
birth and all the things that turn around it. The looks and gestures of
the worshipping characters in the arras are echoed in the aseptic rooms,
among the complicated machinery, under the cold light of the hospitals'
departments, where children are born, little creatures that are the fruit
of their parents' love, as if they were the modern Joseph and Mary.
