NATURE IS TRANSFORMATION / MEMORY IS OBLIVION

Over the years, the important social and political changes brought about by the fall of the Berlin Wall, have profoundly changed the representative significance of the presence of Sony on the island of Brioni in Croatia. The important gift of the elephant on the part of Indira Gandhi to the controversial but beloved head of state, Marshal Tito, and its transfer to what used to be Tito’s private island of Brioni but which is now a popular tourist resort, confers on Sony the important task of being a symbol of the passage from an era of totalitarianism to a period of a fundamental tendency towards democracy.

Sony, with the long memory typically associated with elephants and his unawareness of human history, is a strong symbol of nature which transcends history, and this living, imposing animal wins the challenge with the past; In comprising within himself symbolic elements of history, memory and 'active oblivion', he opens up the idea of 'nature, continuity and transformation'.

The project is a multimedia work made up of photos, three video, a sculptural work and a live performance.

CIRCUS MEME - in collaboration with Ennio Guerrato - 5’48’’ / is one of three project videos. This video is divided into three distinct images; in the first we can make out the blurred forms of the two elephants (Sony and his partner Lanka), in the second we see the skin of Sony in black and white and in the third we have images of a typical day in their life. Sony is explored and circumnavigated like a planet that has still to be discovered, an elephant world that is present but also a utopia where the force of nature and the future attempts to discover in a symbolic journey the means of purifying the memory of all forms of coercion.