From the exhibition “Praticare l’altrove” MACTE, Termoli. 2024 Re-adapted version of the installation. Curator Alice Labor and Ginevra Ludovici
A celebration takes over the museum space: a scent of incense fills the central hall, while a caravan-wheelbarrow, invisible animals, bells, dolls, gazes, and curious objects surround the visitor, who unknowingly becomes part of this festive ritual. The works invade the exhibition space like traces of an occult rite, a procession, masks, and ex-votos. Sorella carovana (2019) is a mobile home with eyes, hands, and strange presences, embroidered by the artist using organic and inorganic materials. It is a haunted house, protected and enlivened by talismans. A scent of churches and invisible rituals permeates the atmosphere.
It is a feast of both human and non-human animals; the guardian of the scent is, in fact, a little pig that refers to a widespread European tradition of the collective care of this animal as sustenance for the community. Bells with monstrous shapes hang from the ceiling, also part of a ritual that changes form each time. In front of them, a series of ceramic dolls, decorated like ex-votos or fetishes, represent a prayer or a gesture of gratitude to an unknown deity. A face appears inside an antique plate: it is the gaze of Saint Lucy, protector of sight and symbol of light—golden leaves guarding invisible dreams and visions.
The animism that characterizes Beatrice Celli’s practice and research emerges in every detail of these ghostly presences, evoking other worlds, other rites, and other communities. The importance of rituals for the artist becomes clear in this celebration where death and superstition intertwine in a single vital flow, transforming into generative and participatory occasions for the creation of new shared rites.
“Rituals and ceremonies are genuine human actions capable of revealing life as festive and magical, while their disappearance desacralizes and profanes it, reducing it to mere survival.” As philosopher Byung-Chul Han reminds us, ritual practices have the power to re-enchant the world with their healing energies—and it is precisely within this ongoing re-enchantment that Celli’s work finds its place.
Alice Labor tr BC
Photo credits : Gianluca di Iola
First version of the installation “Festa Macabracadabra”, Villa Arson, 2019
The macabracadabra feast is an invented feast in which you can decide whether or not to participate. A smoking black ceramic pig wraps me in an intense smell that I have felt somewhere before. The memory transports me to other times and spaces, an ancient and heavy smell like the one I felt every Sunday. I enter. A large sculpture catches my attention, it looks like a caravan but is mounted on a wheelbarrow. What would contain such an object ? I look at all the figures that undulate on the black skin looking for a possible opening. Internal and external constellations of an esoteric language that I want to know more about. Dragons, pointed hands, invisible animals…
Moreover I see peppers, bells, curious objects. There is no doubt about its occult content. I imagine a rich procession following it, I imagine colorful dresses, festive sounds, unbelievable masks. A series of strange bells attract me, I like to play them while listening to the different variations of sounds. They disturb and fascinate me in the same time, they are a little scary with their monstrous shapes and sharp teeth. They are not reassuring, just the opposite of the time marked by the church bells.
On the other side seven dolls made of salt dough are watching me. Richly decorated, between ex-voto and voodoo dolls, it seems each owns a soul and a personality and that they can suddenly start talking. In Abruzzo, there is a old wedding ritual in which many couples dance around a post and everyone hold a ribbon which is linked to the top of the post. if the ribbons get tangled, it means that the wedding will not work. I see a votive tree, which reminds me of this ritual. I see that it is built with links, knots, ribbons. They are very tangled. Suddenly I am disturbed by the presence of razor blades at the end of the ribbons that make any dance impossible.
BC
