Show promoted by the Department of Culture of Rome Capital and Special Company Palaexpo. Created by Special Company Palaexpo in collaboration with Archivio Celestino.

The exhibition constitutes a reflection and an open investigation on the type of perception and the level of awareness that our civilization has towards animals and animality. Since its debut in the 1980s, the artist has always focused his work on the relationship between man and the environment. In this exhibition, he uses his photographic gaze filtered through history, myth, and contemporaneity to represent his vision of the animal world, the majesty and tenacity of animals, their suffering, and pride. The images, ideally assumed as sacred icons, aim to induce in the viewer a purifying catharsis in close dialogue with the history of the Slaughterhouse, now sublimated in a museum setting.

The exhibition path presents some large-format photographic portraits dedicated to the world of bovids and equines, a core of four artist interpretations of historical photos from the late 19th century of Count Primoli dedicated to the Slaughterhouse, enriched by the documentary inscriptions of the Testaccio area owned by the Capitol Archive. The exhibition continues in the dialogue between sculpture and photography with the series Mnemosyne - in reference to the Atlas of Memory and Aby Warburg's Pathosformel - and with the series of photographic elaborations derived from classical sculptures photographed in national and international museums. Both series retrace movements and forms of zoomorphic subjects, derived from nature and classicism, tracing a sort of sentimental biography and at the same time a map of a civilization in a sacred relationship with the animal figure.

The last photographic series, including the human figure, testifies to a close, complex, and perhaps contradictory relationship between man and animality.

The artist's visual and in some respects visionary ability reveals the difficulty of a knowledge of the non-human animal world that, although not exhaustive, aspires to achieve a balance, not only aesthetic but also ethical.