Michele Ciacciofera: beginningless endless

The title of this book beginningless endless resonates with the quote from Montaigne (Les Essais). But also with the artist’s attachment to the Mediterranean territory—a space of possibilities with fluid borders. Finally, with the heightened sense of metamorphosis and hybridization that characterizes Ciacciofera’s work.

Documenting the last ten years of activity of the Italian artist, the book highlights his major contribution to the reconstitution (and the claim) of a transmediterranean imagination. Its visual and poetic expression extends to many areas all tackled by Ciacciofera; whether they are practices or forms linked to craftsmanship and popular theatre, ancient architecture, mythological concepts, symbolic or even esoteric codes. Signs distilled on a multi-track path, drifting between the ports of Sicily, the Rif mountains and the remains of Tire. During her life Michele Ciacciofera travelled the whole earth, guided by the tropism “of” the South and cultivating the spirit of cosmopolitanism. His paradoxically “inhabited” peregrinations are so many opportunities to immerse oneself in an ecosystem and to let his creative process hybridize with his contact. They echo anachronistically with the multiple invasions that shaped the artist’s native land, the one that is at the crossroads of all its excesses, Sardinia: Greek, Roman, Arab, Carthaginian, Spanish… All of Ciacciofera’s travels reflect the initiation rite permanent record of the multiple archaeological sites visited, probed stones, deciphered alphabets, which dot the artist’s works with their ghostly presence. He creates like an archaeologist who, having examined an infinite number of objects in all materiality, finally resolves to search for their lost aura, rather than their purely tangible existence.

beginningless endless is the catalog accompanying the exhibition by Michele Ciacciofera at  the Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne-Château de Rochechouart (May 19—December 15, 2021). Introduction by Sébastien Faucon. Texts by Valérie da Costa, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Roberta Garieri,  Morad Montazami and Michele Ciacciofera.

Zamân Books & Curating in co-edition with the  Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne-Château de Rochechouart

This publication was produced with the participation of: Fondazione di Sardegna, Loreto Immobilier, Marco Sormani, Giancarlo Ciacciofera, Galerie Michel Rein (Paris/Bruxelles), IOOS Trento.

Graphic design: Julia, Rome
Trilingual volume: French / English / Italian
Hardcover 21 x 29.70 cm
338 p., 250 ill. col.