FINIS TERRAE

Finis Terrae not only describes a geopolitical coordinate, but evokes a limiting condition of our time. The title recalls the eastern borders of the European oikumene: those symbolic and enclosed spaces that medieval cartography and herbaria populated with monstra, deformed bodies, and plants with anthropomorphic roots, such as mandrake, used to challenge and transcend the boundaries of the known. In a present fragmented by global conflicts and ongoing identity crises, the exhibition is configured as a critical device created to undermine the rigidity of these borders. The curatorial project combines the research of Dario Caria, Nadia Mazzei and Marina Scardacciu: three perspectives that converge on the theme of the Geographies of Tension, capable of leading us to the extreme edge of this “borderland,” translating the exhibition space into a physical and emotional journey through the lacerations of our society.
In this context, the work of art fits in as the product of a Foucaultian ’“heterotopia”, a real space and other that mixes the utopian body with the concreteness of physical reality. This investigation offers no consolatory solutions and forces us to look beyond the edge of the precipice, reactivating that scientific and artistic curiosity that was typical of the Renaissance and the encyclopedic studies of Ulisse Aldrovandi, where the monstrous and the unknown were catalogued for understanding. Curatorial action thus seeks to foster a precise ethical positioning among the public, invited to explore these areas of dissent not as a simple observer, but as an active witness to an end and, at the same time, a new discovery. The exhibition redefines art as an instrument of intellectual resistance: a critical beacon that lights its light right where stability gives way, the dialogue between the parties is interrupted and, literally, the earth seems to end.