Nicola Ciancio is co-founder of Ex-voto Association for Radical Public Culture, a collective working on hybrid projects focused on the sharing of culture and creative processes, new forms of socialisation and public space.
With It’s Raining Gods (and Goddesses) Simona Da Pozzo shares the Atlas of Bodies research that she has been conducting on the Corpo di Napoli Monument since 2019: an attempt at an alliance with a monument to narrate the multiple bodies that inhabit the city. The monument is a 2nd-century BC marble sculpture placed in the heart of the Regio Nilensis by the Alexandrians. Today it stands in Largo Corpo di Napoli, on the lowest pedestal in the city.
Simona’s encounter with the Corpo di Napoli is a loving one, and this lovingness marks the paradigm shift that the artist activates with respect to the international debate on monuments, without losing the critical impulse towards the concept of monumentality developed in previous years through Hacking Monuments. The slow process of research – which leads her to spend hours and hours observing the Corpo di Napoli and the dynamics surrounding it – aims at progressively involving inhabitants, activists, professionals and institutions from the world of art and culture, local shopkeepers, etc. in a plural and collective projection of stories about the monument, in a bidirectional path between history and contemporaneity, between observation and active perception.
Ex-Voto [Association for Radical Public Culture] supports Atlas of Bodies for its innovative and persistent reflection on the public sphere and is pleased to present this new chapter in collaboration with the MANN Museum and Rita di Maria.
image: frame from video ‘Notes on a polyamorous relationship with the Corpo di Napoli’ by Simona Da Pozzo.
IT'S RAINING GODS (& GODDESSES) 