An imposing tiger shark of over 3 meters and the skeleton of a sperm whale of about 10 meters, both from the XNUMXth century, in the crypt of the Museo Marino Marini in Florence. This is the scenario in which visitors can immerse themselves from 1st July until 30th September with the installation "Of Sharks and Whales", the new exhibition project - in collaboration with the 'La Specola' Museum of the Florence University Museum System – which brings the past and present into dialogue to draw the public's attention to environmental issues and invite everyone to a shared reflection on the future that is being built.
The project curated by Fausto Barbagli, curator of the Museum System of the University of Florence and President of the National Association of Scientific Museums, provides – for the first time in the suggestive crypt of the only contemporary art museum in the city – the exhibition of some finds from the Specola, currently closed to the public. The installation presents a parallelism between "cultural ecosystems" and "natural ecosystems" which makes it possible to overcome the traditional dichotomy between art and science, and intends to help raise awareness and inform the public about environmental changes and the consequences that human action causes on natural balances: from the extinction of animal species to the dramatic spread of viruses, as has just happened with the Coronavirus pandemic.
The shark, at the top of the marine food pyramid, embodies man's most ancestral fears but, at the same time as an endangered animal, expresses the urgency of rethinking the consumption of the planet. Its image – representation of life and death, extinction and salvation – is profoundly contemporary and, not surprisingly, has become an icon in the work of the British artist Damien Hirst. The whale bones, presented in an "illustrative" way on the floor of the crypt, recall artistic expressions linked to recomposition, in forms that go beyond the very idea of disintegration. The quotation is addressed to artists, such as Gino de Dominicis, capable through artistic transformation of conceptually arresting the irreversibility of time.
The project, which kicks off the restart of the museum's exhibition programme, which has just reopened following the closure due to the Covid-19 health emergency, is accompanied by the review "Marine fragments", edited by the theater critic Roberto Incerti, which with its appointments presents a poetic and intense reading-interpretation of the man-nature relationship and its consequences, proposing excerpts from the novel Moby Dick by the American writer Herman Melville.
The Marino Marini Museum in Florence is open to the public on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 18:30 to 22:30 and on Sundays from 10:00 to 19:00.
All information is available on www.museomarinomarini.it
