Lugano
On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of its prestigious activity, Libreria Bocca – Locale Storico d’Italia under the patronage of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Gold Medal of the Chamber of Commerce of Milan and the oldest bookshop in Italy and perhaps in the world – is initiating several celebratory events. One of these is the participation of a number of visual artists who have been invited to design a work for the central façade of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.
One of them is Marco Di Giovanni, an artist from Abruzzo who lives between Imola and the countryside, and whose work is entitled RADICATA.
Curator Paolo Repetto writes: “In fact, Marco Di Giovanni’s installation consists of three new works (three is a deeply symbolic number for the artist): a large one, about four metres high, entitled Radicata, another smaller one, Enciclopedia della donna, and finally Impossibile catalogo di Gino De Dominicis: a cover decorated with the artist’s name ‘written’ in gold thread.
Di Giovanni often uses Moleskine notebooks in his work, in compositions that are always similar and different, as a kind of general theme and variations. Travel notebooks, notes, metaphysical paths where dots and grey lines describe geographies of the unknown, real and fantastic forms, ancestral symbols, a mapping upwards, an elsewhere, to escape the limiting constraints of space and time. In this new work, Radicata, twenty-four agendas in three different formats represent an ideal creeper, actually three intertwined branches, a presence at once vegetable and metaphysical, a kind of invented DNA, a secret code as testimony and denunciation.