Paradoxes of Plenty #54 (Serpent Ritual)

Commissioned by MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale in Turin as part of a one-year residency project, the work draws inspiration from the interdisciplinary compositional method introduced by the art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929), and pays homage to his famous conference published posthumously under the title A Lecture on Serpent Ritual (1984). The work is a long roll of paper in mixed media—collage, frottage, and drawing—on the theme of the capitalist development of textile production and its social consequences: a narrative in images where elements from different eras, cultures, and contexts coexist, composed by the artist from artifacts in the MAO’s collections. The serpent, a regenerative symbol of transformation, runs through the entire piece, linking images ranging from plates on textile art in the Encyclopédie (1751–72) by Denis Diderot and Jean Baptiste Le Rond d’Alembert to photographs of the collapse of the Rana Plaza factories in Dhaka in 2013.