Installation View – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #096 (2022)La Galleria Nazionale
The idea of considering nature as something separate from us has driven us way off course
Installation View – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #077 (2022)La Galleria Nazionale
If we retrace history, philosophy, literature and art, we find timid signs but also strong positions in this regard. Nothing seems to stop us, despite the predictions of an apocalypse. Either we are too ingenuous or too disenchanted.
Gideon Mendel, photo series – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #008 by Gideon MendelLa Galleria Nazionale
Yet, if there is a good way to throw away our lives, and not only, it is to complain rather than to act. We may all be ready for radical, structural transformations, but we are also tired of feeling only our own burden of responsibility.
Angry Birds of America - Yellow Finch – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #113 (2018) by Ida ApplebroogLa Galleria Nazionale
The community is constantly being refounded. Utopia must be nurtured because it is the project of a future that is only partially predictable. It is still the planet Earth that we temporarily inhabit, but less and less poetically.
Listening to the Stars III – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #156 (2020) by Glenda LéonLa Galleria Nazionale
The great Rachel Carson wrote that "the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction"; yet beauty seems to be the uncanny beginning of terror, as Rainer Maria Rilke said.
Installation View – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #146 (2022)La Galleria Nazionale
We remember General Patton's words “to create is beautiful but to destroy is sublime” or in Apocalypse Now, as he watches the havoc he exclaims: “How I love it all”. Because aesthetics in its literal sense means sensitive and its opposite is not ugly but literally the anesthetic, the narcotic, the insensitive, the immobile.
Primate – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #031 (2009) by Daphne WrightLa Galleria Nazionale
Because we are constantly part of the paradox, it is about creating a new set of priorities and incorporating it into the principle of contradiction.
Installation View – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #052 (2022)La Galleria Nazionale
We should always resist purist logic, which makes us give up because it always makes us imperfect. As if it were an exclusion game. In fact, even the museum pollutes, even the exhibition HOT SPOT, despite the good intentions, but our awareness and sensitivity increases. And the possibility of changing things together could become unstoppable.
Installation View – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #054 (2022)La Galleria Nazionale
Transformations are inevitable and continual, and they are not necessarily negative. We should stop being attached to a past that perhaps never existed as we remember it and stand firmly in the present. Indeed, we should think of ourselves as the past of the future.
Installation View – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #161 (2022)La Galleria Nazionale
If we not only hear but listen to the grievances of the earth, we can reach out to it and get ourselves out of trouble – we need to be our own baron Munchausens. Alternatively, the earth will find its way to put things right and will outlive us.
Installation View – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #044 (2022)La Galleria Nazionale
Finally, I always remain of the same opinion: “action speaks louder”. Not only that, I will never get tired of repeating and repeating to myself a fulminating phrase by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: "when the time comes when one could, the one in which one can is finished".
Cristiana Collu, Director of the National Gallery
