The tree of life, Exhibition Palazzo Mocenigo Museum, Venice

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The tree of life:

By Carla Tolomeo

From 25 May to 24 November 2024

Palazzo Mocenigo Museum

Santa Croce, 1992, Venice

Closed now: open at 10:00

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The project The Tree of Life presents itself as the sum of Carla Tolomeo's creative journey, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' Fantastic Zoology, developing it in the third dimension. Inhabited by phantasmagorical creatures, deduced from universal cosmogonies, it is a metaphor for existence that continually renews itself. A work of art in progress that, like a tree, develops, grows, lives, and dies. The grand installation will be entirely covered with fabric in its components, leaves, fruits, animals, with a supporting structure in iron and wood: eco-sustainable, therefore, like all of Tolomeo's work. The choice of fabrics pays homage to Venetian textile craftsmanship: the work, in fact, in its entire complexity - both vegetal and zoomorphic - is the result of the assembly of different, colorful, extraordinary fabrics, bearing the mark of the four Venetian textile producers, namely: Bevilacqua, Fortuny, Rubelli, Antico Cotonificio Veneziano (actively involved in the project's realization). The placement in the Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo testifies to the continuation of the Venetian textile tradition, craftsmanship and art at the same time, in the 21st century. In all cosmogonies, the Origin is represented vertically, born and rising from the water and reaching towards the sky. It is almost always a mutating object between the animal and vegetable genres, its metamorphoses are paraphrases of evolution or a tale of creation in an indecipherable, finite and infinite time, just as infinite are the forms in which the initial energy manifests and materializes. In Borges' Manual de zoología fantastica, it is the Bahamuth: from the water emerges an immense fish, which then becomes a tree, bull, bird, ruby, angel. In the 496th night of the Book of One Thousand and One Nights, Isa (Jesus) manages to see the Bahamuth but loses consciousness. Under the fish is the sea and under the sea an abyss of air and under that is fire and under that a great serpent that has hell in its mouth. The story seems to illustrate the cosmological proof of the existence of God, arguing that every cause presupposes a previous cause and affirming the need to posit a first cause to avoid continuing indefinitely.

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	opens - closes	last entry
monday	Closed now
tuesday	10:00 - 18:00
wednesday	10:00 - 18:00
thursday	10:00 - 18:00
friday	10:00 - 18:00
saturday	10:00 - 18:00
sunday	10:00 - 18:00

The tree of life:

By Carla Tolomeo

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