Tiziana Pers solo show at Prometeo Gallery with Leonardo Caffo and Piermario De Angelis essay

The exhibition is conceived as an integral part of Art_History: an artist’s ongoing project built from time to time on the exchange – contractually regulated – between one of his paintings and one or more animals destined for slaughter.

Protagonists of ART_HISTORY / Municeddhe: Sleepers are eleven land snails – municeddhe – rescued from Pers and removed from that tragic process that begins with sale and ends with death: a path in which the animal ceases, step by step, to be a living body to become a mute ‘instrument’ destined for something else, inserted in a one-way practice of domination.

In Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani’s spaces, the survival of the eleven snails, initiated by Pers with an exchange, in turn documented by eleven contracts (one for each individual snail), is formally rendered by visual and sonic traces such as photographs, paintings, drawings and videos: different media in which the artist’s subtle activism takes shape, acting and creating loopholes in the infrastructure of the system, rather than flattening itself into a frontal and aesthetically spectacular critique.

The municeddhe are silent and wandering: bodies that are considered “unproductive” because they live a different life without precise direction, and yet embody in their nomadic hearts a fullness towards the world around them. In ART_HISTORY / Municeddhe: Sleepers, Pers’s works make this aesthetic truth their own and amplify it into a concrete processuality of stories, relationships, signatures, and contracts, in which the animal-human and the animal-snail project each other, breaking down all boundaries: equal parts of the same living being.

Is it possible to assign an economic value to a living being? And to a work of art? Moving from these questions, and amplifying them, Pers’s practice confronts the pervasiveness of the food industry – which commodifies and removes, physically and symbolically, the animal body – posing itself at the same time both as a denunciation and as the implementation of other and opposite relationships: short circuits of survival that go to suspend, from within, the deadly nature of this system.