ALTRI TEMPI ALTRI MITI : DE RERUM RURALE

TEXT FOR 16th QUADRIENNALE DI ROMA

Curated by Matteo Lucchetti

Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Roma, Italy, 2016

In La rivoluzione del filo di paglia (The one-straw revolution, 2016), Michelangelo Consani refers to stories of farmers as a counter-narrative, raising the tale of a weak, minority mass of smallholders to a key place in history. The “patron saint” of this position, a recurrent figure in the artist’s work and represented here by a terracotta sculpture, is the revolutionary Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka, who pioneered natural agriculture based on the self-regulation of the spontaneous processes of the land. Supported by a pedestal resting on the back of a tortoise – a reference to the first ode to slowness: festina lente – the bust is immersed in the projection of an iconic scene from Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) by Giuseppe De Santis, which reintroduces the figures and the precarious situation faced by workers as a result of intensive farming methods, migrants, asylum seekers and local communities, who have been working together for some time on the park and the economy it generates.