And yet it moves

And yet it moves (Galileo), various materials – wood, flag, mechanism, Darth Vader breath, 2020.

If you watch it from a distance, it is like receiving a punch in the stomach: you will realize that it is trudging under a ventilator; Italy is lying in a hospital bed, on its back. But if you get close enough, everything will change: the flag is not waving, of course… And yet it moves.

Corrado Bonomi’s Italy shows unexpected stocks of oxygen, and it does not stop surprising and be surprised in front of the “Death Star” crowned by Spikes. Italy drops on its knees, in the same way Galileo was forced to drop on his knees in the presence of the Holy Inquisition. And yet it keeps on moving in many ways: health solidarity, digital solidarity, artistic and social solidarity – which we read about everyday in several newspapers.

That's what art's for: to leave a permanent trace IN and OF everyday life of the History, in its developing, in its unpredictability, in its violence and in its little miracles.

And Contemporary Art is the undisputed star of this quarantine: when words come to an end, when stories have to contain the whole emotional and symbolic weight of something that you cannot grasp entirely, then the power of the image and the representation will come to help.

The history told by Bonomi is the following: when Italy feels hunted, exhausted, imprisoned, when it is forced to abjure its own nature in front of the Court of Life, the lateral thinking comes to help it, so much that everyone who knows it closely, can affirm with a touch of pride: “And yet it moves”.

Fabiola Chiara Colabraro
Press Office Corrado Bonomi