On Thursday 4 May at 6 pm, the National Gallery opens Libro Morto: the exhibition and presents to the public a selection of 13 photographs taken from the performance Libro Morto, conceived and directed by the artist Paco Cao.

The exhibition project is the result of a process born from the work of conceiving the performance, initially presented in 2016 at the library of the Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx (New York) and re-proposed, in October 2022, in the evocative setting of the Museum's Nymphaeum Nazionale Etrusco, the place where the Premio Strega has been held since 1953, the most important event involving books and the entire Italian literary community.

The artistic action, conceived by Paco Cao as a sequence of ritual actions with an eschatological value, materializes in the representation of the death sentence of a book - The museum of the victim, a novel by the same author published by MV Edizioni in 2009 - reduced to pieces with a chainsaw and later buried while a prayer was read in his memory. Dead book, contrary to what it might seem, is not so much an explicit denunciation of censorship as a reflection on the book as a fetish in a dialectical relationship with violence and, in particular, with nature which is involved in the production of the book itself. Through prayer, the burial of the volume and a ritual of restitution and reception, one seeks reunification with Mother Earth, often exploited for the exclusive benefit of human beings.