Sand Storms in Medio Mundi

Meditating on Earth & The World is so far Reversed, 2022 are two tapestries created manually on the loom by the artist, in collaboration with expert textile restorers, using lacquered threads (with a silk core), silks of various origins, ramie, rafia. The two pieces are part of Lisa Batacchi's project Sand Storms in Medio Mundi, 2021-2022.

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In this latest project of Lisa Batacchi a melancholy atmosphere prevails, although tinted with a subtle expectation feeling while waiting for the manifestation of a new Weltanschauung that could initiate a subsequent new human cycle on earth, overcoming the current predominant ideology of progress understood as a insatiable machine of available energy.

Quoting Kahil Gibran, that of the "Storm" is an image that can make us think of certain negative aspects of the world, the upheavals of nature and inner life, from which man can emerge with reflection and enlightenment.

The artist has followed the yellow-ocher color as a narrative device, that of the dunes of Taklamakan, the Great Tartary of the Thousand and One Nights, a crossroads along the Silk Road of cultures, religions, rituals as well as commercial exchanges. Here the sandstorms have swept away travelers, warriors, merchants and submerged villages, temples, monasteries, minarets and entire civilizations.

Among the many civilizations of the past, there is a reference to the Zaroastrian-Mazda one that focuses on the cult of nature and on a dualistic vision: good / evil, human / inhuman, spiritual / material. In the Mazda’s Iran of ancient Persia there was the place of the “Imaginatio vera” of alchemy and active imagination, a interworld between the sensible and the intelligible whose disappearance, according to the orientalist Henry Corbin, "brings with it a catastrophe of the Spirit”. This way of perceiving and meditating on the Earth is linked to a psycho-spiritual structure that, for the artist’s point of view, could be useful to today's civilization that seems to have lost its coordinates.

The installation therefore unfolds among textile elements, symbols and colors that recall both ancient Persian mysticism as also the various shades of sand dunes. Other colors will also emerge: for example, the golden arrows made with the brocade technique explore the bond that the ancients had with the Divine and that our contemporary society seems to have lost by pursuing the new "technological prophecies".

With a critical-poetic spirit, Sand Storms in Medio Mundi also wants us to reflect on the link between the ancient Silk Road and the most recent Chinese Belt and Road Initiative as questioning on how this new project will cross places and habitats ecologically fragile.