The exhibition project for the Meridiana Prize, Everything is all things curated by Mario Francesco Simeone and promoted by the association Amici del Madre with Antony Morato and Fondazione Tridama 

At the dawn of the modern age, the obsessive search for gold by the main European powers fueled colonial expansion and the organization of new economic systems based on the exploitation of resources and bodies. In Brazil, the main gold-bearing territory under Portuguese rule, the Crown exercised strict control over the extraction and circulation of precious metals. To ensure the "royal fifth," a 20% tax on extracted gold, severe measures were imposed against smuggling. One of the widespread methods to evade these controls was to hide the gold inside sacred images, mostly baroque statues of saints made of wood. The statues were made with a hollow ("oco") body and an access door, so they could contain and transport small amounts of metal in an unsuspected way. Deviation was a constant throughout the colonial extraction period. From an ambiguous image, "santo do pau oco" entered Brazilian common language to indicate someone who presents themselves in one way but conceals a different nature.

Santa do pau oco takes its title from this expression, altering its gender, to investigate the relationship between surface and depth. In the works of Clarissa Baldassarri (Civitanova, 1994), Maria Luce Cacciaguerra (Palermo, 1997), and Anna Maria Maiolino (Scalea, 1942), there is a common interest in perceptual thresholds and language. The three artists investigate, each in their own way, liminal territories. While Baldassarri explores the limit through sensory and spiritual transcendence, and Cacciaguerra poetically traverses it as a territory of possibilities, Anna Maria Maiolino inhabits it as a place of resistance.

Having emigrated to Brazil as a teenager, active since the 1960s and trained in the repressive context of the military dictatorship, Maiolino has built an artistic practice capable of asserting a female political presence within a system that denied its existence. In her works, the creative gesture is inseparable from the destructive one, each form arising from a tension between opposites. Cacciaguerra's speculative interest comes from concrete poetry and continues its principles in a contemporary research that here, for the first time, takes on a physical dimension, relating art history, literature, and a broad personal archive. Baldassarri focuses on perceptual and sensory limits in relation to the transience of the body and time, through a spiritually rooted practice expressed mainly in site-specific projects encompassing installation, video, sculpture, and performance.

The exhibition presents a transversal reflection on life and death, understood not as opposites but as coexisting forces. The three artists, from different generations, move between similar means in the desire to question the deep structures of language. Santa do pau oco is part of the Meridiana Prize, curated by Mario Francesco Simeone and promoted by the Fondazione Donnaregina – Museo Madre and by the Amici del Madre, dedicated to supporting curatorial research and the emerging artistic scene of Southern Italy. The exhibition engages with the theme of the first edition of the Prize, Everything is all things, inspired by Elio Vittorini's Conversation in Sicily.