The Madre's collection will expand with the donation by the artist Mathilde Rosier of her new video work Le massacre du printemps (2020). The presentation is curated by Andrea Viliani and made in collaboration with Residency 80121.

In this work Mathilde Rosier creates, as often in her practice, a personal narrative starting from existing narratives. Le massacre du Printemps, defined by the artist as “ an agrarian dance on Naples ” is in fact inspired by the Spring Festival (Le sacre du printemps), a ballet created by Vaslav Nijinsky for the Ballets Russes in 1913, to music by Igor Stravinsky. The theme of the work is also connected to the figure of the set designer and costume designer of the original ballet, Nicholas Roerich, as the artist herself writes: "The atmosphere of the piece is catastrophic, Roerich was thinking of an imminent end of the world but with the hope of rebirth for a wiser humanity. "

Three different matrix places constitute the scenario of the work: the greenhouses of Pompeii, “metaphors of how intense productivity can be part of a deadly process”; the industrial port and the city center of Naples, where "pollution and the incoherence of human activity dance on the volcano"; finally, the former industrial site and the bay of Pozzuoli, “a seriously contaminated land and an abandoned maritime area, whose desolation contrasts with a seductive beauty”.

The work is divided into two parts, which question the very principles of the original ballet. In the first act of Stravinsky's opera, entitled The Adoration of Earth, the choreography refers to the agricultural dances of pagan Russia. For Rosier the dancers, imitating the movements and gestures of farmers in the fields, the way they touch the earth, connect the act of worshiping the earth with the beginning of what will in fact be its exploration, and therefore the its progressive exploitation. For this reason, the "adoration" of the original ballet actually reveals, for Rosier, the beginning of an unstoppable "exploitation" (The Exploitation of Earth) as the artist explains: "the peasants become ears of wheat, the destiny of humanity is linked to that of plants. We treat ourselves as we treat plants, industrialized, commodified. The blind pursuit of growth, greed, greed, only reflect our inability to be satisfied. This bottomless dissatisfaction is the reason for the disaster. "