Libro Morto: A Short Film By Paco Cao About Nature, Censorship And Violence
Libro Morto (Dead Book) is a short film based on the performance conceived and directed by artist Paco Cao, located in the unique building of Villa Giulia in Rome.
Libro Morto is project promoted and produced by the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea – GNAM), in collaboration with the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia (Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia – ETRU). Libro Morto was presented to the public today by the director of the Etruscan Museum, Valentino Nizzo, and by the director of the National Gallery, Cristiana Collu.
The premiere of the short film was an opportunity for the two Directors to announce the collaboration established between the two institutions through the signing of a memorandum of understanding that allows visitors to purchase admission tickets to the two museums with reductions on the ordinary cost, upon presentation of a ticket from one of the two Institutions.
Libro Morto was conceived as a sequence of ritual actions with eschatological value. Initially presented in 2016, at the library of the Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx (New York), the performance was then replicated, in October 2022, in the setting of the Nymphaeum of the Museo Etruscan National Museum, a place where The Museum of the Victim, a novel by the same author and published by MV Editions in 2009, was condemned to death, hacked to pieces with a chainsaw and later buried during the reading of a prayer in its memory.
In addition to the artist, the conference for the premiere of Libro Morto was attended by Fabio Finotti, director of the Italian Cultural Institute (Istituto Italiano di Cultura) in New York, and the councillor for Culture of the I Municipio (city hall) of Roma Capitale, Giulia Silvia Ghia.
At the end of the conference, participants visited the Nymphaeum, the place where the performance took place and home, since 1953, to the Strega Prize, the most important literary prize in Italy.
Libro Morto, contrary to what it might seem, is not an explicit denunciation of censorship, but put the book in a dialectical relationship with violence and, in particular, with nature that is involved in the production of the book itself.
Through praying and the burial of the volume, in connection with Mother Earth, often exploited for the exclusive benefit of human beings, the project tries to represent a ritual of restitution and reception.
Paco Cao uses a wide range of disciplines and materials, and his work establishes a strong relationship between art, audience and context, challenging the boundaries between high and low culture. His projects are often developed over long periods of time, crossing geographic and cultural boundaries.His work has been exhibited and made in collaboration with, among others, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Museo del Prado, at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Biennale Mercosul (Porto Alegre, Brazil), Museo Carrillo Gil (Mexico City), MART (Rovereto), National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea – Rome).
Photos: Courtesy of GNAM
