Dancing on the Ruins
2020 - Photography, 35mm - Beatrice Zerbato
Beatrice Zerbato (b. 1994, Verona, Italy) is an artist working with photography and archives’ found materials. Her research focuses on the role of images within social, historical and mythological narratives, and how time and context can influence the information. By questioning symbols, objet trouvé and memory, BZ wants to make visible what processes of normalisation have rendered invisible, and to provoke a renewed way of seeing in the spectator. In her practice she works with the impact that progress of science and technology have had on the collective consciousness, and aims to unveil those mechanisms of power that lie behind the images.
Beatrice Zerbato graduated in Disciplines of Arts, Music and Entertainment at the University of Turin, with an experimental thesis on the social use of photography and the role of archives in the digital age. During the same period she did an internship in Museo Nazionale del Cinema of Turin’s archives. She is currently finishing her studies at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, where she is attending a Contemporary Image Master with scholarship. She currently studies and works between Bologna and Modena (IT).
https://www.instagram.com/beaetrx
‘Dancing on the ruins’
Text by Sara Sani
Beatrice Zerbato's research begins with her interest in mythology and the study of religions, which allows her to identify a symbological language to work from within her visuals. In the series of images presented in Dancing on the Ruins, the symbol of the tree as 'ruin' occupies a central role in the construction of the message, and is used as a site for the performance.
Since the beginning, the destiny of men has been interconnected to that of trees with such strong ties that it is legitimate to wonder what will become of a humanity that has brutally broken them. If we want to survive, we will have to rebuild what we have plundered, reconstruct a balance and a harmony that goes back thousands of years.
In almost all the religions of the past, we find examples of the worshiping of trees that were considered sacred, in particular the Cosmic Tree. The tree, source of all life, represented the point of intersection between the physical and metaphysical axis, the axis mundi, the central pillar around which the universe was organised.
The Cosmic Tree in mythology appears as one of the most surprising and universal myths that humanity has conceived to explain the constitution of the universe and the place that man must occupy in it - the point where communication is established between the two worlds alongside the exchange of energies and forces between them.
The conquests of science and technology, together with a materialistic and rationalistic conception of the world, have led to a destruction of the psychic and spiritual goods of humanity: the moment man has no longer known limits to his power, he has set out to destroy himself.
The increasing impoverishment of symbols (through over use), has led the West into a spiritual poverty, which has made human beings uprooted and estranged in a nature emptied of the soul. Carl Gustav Jung said, 'The symbolic unity of spirit and matter has been shattered, so modern man feels uprooted and estranged in a nature emptied of the soul.’
The work Dancing on Ruins salvages the use of the symbology of the tree, to communicate with visuals dense with meaning. Symbology is used as a guiding element for the performance: the human being participates and is complemented by its own symbols in a dance of mourning and rebirth. The broken tree at the center of the images is the stage where the dance takes place, in an imaginative attempt of reconstruction of balance and harmony. Dance becomes a form of struggle, a space conquered by the body capable of shaping the complexity of identity.
So what does it mean to have lost our symbols? How can the contemporary human face the future, often called 'the end of times’?
Nowadays the human being finds themselves in a dangerous situation, completely lost in the limbo of a world in which they feel like a stranger. It becomes evident how opportune it could be for contemporary thought to rediscover an arrangement of the universe that would make man accord with nature, the profane with the sacred, the everyday with the divine.
Read Beatrice’s essay on Sara Sani’s work HERE.
