Paradoxes of Plenty #65

It is from this reflection – ‘By a strange twist of history, slavery and whaling share the same logic: extracting value from bodies considered pure resources, human or animal’ (Philip Hoare, Leviathan, or the Whale, Einaudi, 2009) – that Marzia Migliora lays the foundations for Paradossi dell’Abbondanza #65 (Paradoxes of Plenty #65), created for the exhibition Moby Dick – The Whale. History of a myth from antiquity to contemporary art at the Palazzo Ducale. The work is formally inspired by theatrical dioramas, pre-cinema devices that, through perspective illusions and sequences of moving images, anticipated the birth of film language. In Paradoxes of Plenty #65, a multitude of miniature scenes and characters – humans and animals – populate three circular bases that the public can activate manually, setting the carousel in motion. Two dioramas present scenes composed of clippings from the covers of La Domenica del Corriere (1910–1940), juxtaposed with contemporary drawings and images, creating a layered narrative that is both playful and tragically real. The third carousel displays a five-kilogram sack of salt, a symbolic object due to its name, “La Baleine Sel de Mer”, but also because salt, also known as white gold, is not only of marine origin but was historically the first commodity traded between peoples. The legend of Moby Dick is renewed in a visual narrative that intertwines whaling and the contemporary slave trade as emblems of the extreme exploitation of living beings, from Melville’s era to industrial fishing practices, the shipwrecks of people fleeing, coral harvesting, oil extraction, and the invasion of plastic in the seas. The sea has gradually been transformed into a territory of extraction. Every act of extraction tells the same story of exploitation: the conversion of living beings into resources, of matter into value. In this movement of history, the sea becomes a mine and a mirror of the economies that traverse it.