Matera, Andrea Fogli's 59 terracotta heads arrive at Carmine church

The Church of the Carmine in Matera has opened the exhibition "The Angel of History," which will run until October 20, 2018. This exhibition features an installation displaying the 59 terracotta heads made by Roman artist Andrea Fogli, also the creator of the event. These heads are all placed on one large table in front of the altar in the church shrouded in semi-darkness.

“This work stems from the need to put man at the center,” Fogli explains, “the human condition in its reality, through a process of ’empathy and identification’ capable of opposing the distance and indifference that increasingly characterize not only contemporary art, but Western societies and our daily behaviors.”

Fogli, with this project seeks to “draw from oblivion what History erases, persecutes and humiliates, giving back a face to those from whom it has been taken away, sometimes in a more devious way than the primitive rite of beheading, which by the way does not cease to be perpetrated.”
The title of the exhibition is inspired by the thoughts of Walter Benjamin who wrote “...an angel who seems to be in the act of turning away from something on which he fixes his gaze. His eyes are wide open, his mouth open, his wings outstretched. The angel of the story must look like this. He has his face turned to the past. Where a chain of events appears to us, he sees a single catastrophe, relentlessly piling ruin upon ruin and toppling them at his feet. He would like to restrain himself, to awaken the dead and recompose the shattered. But a storm blowing in from heaven, which has entangled itself with his wings, is so strong that he can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly toward the future, to which he turns his back as the pile of ruins rises before him to heaven. What we call progress is this storm.”

The exhibition opens at the same time as the publication of a book, “Diary of Dust and Clay,” published by Quodlibet and introduced by philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in which the artist has collected the 59 terracotta heads with diary excerpts written “in the margin” to each sculpture, and some of the 59 graphite powder drawings accompanied by fragments written from 1980 to the present in which he jotted down his thoughts on face, image, dust and evanescence. Hours: daily, including holidays, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Free admission.

Matera, Andrea Fogli's 59 terracotta heads arrive at Carmine church

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