For the residency #MAOTempoPresente, the artist Marzia Migliora worked at MAO for a few months between 2022 and 2023, looking at works in storage, assimilating objects, styles and images found in the museum collection and transforming them into a composite alphabet that she used to create The Snake Ritual, that takes its title from the eponymous essay by the German art historian Aby Warburg.
The Snake Ritual comprises tapestries that partly use MAO’s monumental stair and are based on a large scroll filled with mixed media images – collage, frottage, drawing – that the artist made looking at ritual and sculptural works in the collection.
In this large drawing, varied works from different times and cultures intersect and interact, creating a visual narrative in which each element coexists with the others in a single intense, ahistorical setting.
Starting with the drawing on paper, Migliora created five tapestries with Giovanni Bonotto (A Collection), a metaphorical weaving of time and history, hung before our eyes like the sudarium of a contemporary, suffering anthropic world. The work creates a symbolic bridge between the MAO collection and the contemporary world, metaphorically combining space-time and warp and weft in an emotional, ahistorical and experiential crescendo.