Francesco Jodice

Museo Fortuny, Venice

December 19, 2019 - March 24 2020

The aesthetics of the ruins is a crucial element in the history of Western civilization: it symbolizes the presence of the past, but at the same time it contains within itself the potential of the fragment. The ruin, in fact, is never neutral: contested between nature and culture, suspended between destruction and reconstruction, it is immersed in the flow of time and at the same time is stretched towards eternity. It comes from the past, it gives a richness of meaning to the present, it gives awareness to future projects.

Chronologically, the exhibition will try to range over the centuries for salient points, in order to give an idea of ​​the historical complexity of the concept: from the first mythologies of destruction, the effect of divine wrath (the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah ...), up to Palmyra's “iconoclastic terrorism”, including ancient Egypt, Greco-Roman antiquity, the “instauratio Romae”, the “ruine du Louvre”, the war destruction of the last century, the rubble of the Twin Towers.

The collapse of the architecture evokes the decadence of the civilization that produced them, so the parallel building-body is the revealing element that, if on the one hand it refers to the transience of human life and to the corruption of bodies, on the other it opens to the concept of cyclicality: alternating in the history of crisis and rebirth.
Even today, the contemplation of the ruins can be a source of new awareness for those who exercise their memory on the one hand and planning on the other.