La Torre di Babele

The member Tuscan galleries of the ANGAMC (National Association of Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art) come together to contribute to the events accompanying the re-opening of Museum Pecci in Prato with the exhibition La Torre di Babele (The Tower of Babel), curated by Pietro Gaglianò at ex fabbrica Lucchesi, Piazza Macelli, Prato. Each of the twenty-three galleries involved will exhibit a work by a single artist who represents, even if in an incomplete way, the history and vocation of each.
Galleria Il Ponte exhibits the sculpture Boto Rosa (Pink Boto) by Zoè Gruni.
The work of Zoè Gruni captures the essence of the function of collective cultural memory. Her works offer an original artistic observation point for the social processes of functions such as myths and traditions. The artist thus builds up an archive of choral mythologies which are in contrast to the secularization of contemporary society. The sculpture Boto Rosa, which offers a new contemporary exegesis of a Brazilian native legend which still survives in oral folk culture, was created by a process which the artist has used for all her projects: recovery of hybrid, ambiguous forms obtained with the use of everyday materials and linked to the territorial context. Analyzing the psychological function and the system of existence which favor the conservation of these mythologies and their universality, links with the power systems can be identified, and we realise to what extent these stories serve to exorcise and confine our fears. Today Boto Rosa connects also the two continents, and while his head emerges in Prato, the tail surfaces from the waters of a fountain in the garden of the Museu da Republica in Rio de Janeiro, as part of the project Intervenções Bradesco.