Remains

Remains – part of the solo show Velme, curated by Beatrice Merz at Cà Rezzonico Museo del Settecento Veneziano in Venice – takes its cue from Pietro Longhi’s painting The Rhinoceros (1751), in the collections of Ca’ Rezzonico, which depicted the Indian rhinoceros Clara, owned by Douwe Mout van der Meer, a Dutch Indian impresario who took her around to perform in traveling shows in major European cities for seventeen years. Longhi portrays a scene that expresses the colonial system that took hold at the time, while Migliora explores its continuity in the present, depicting the animal’s horn as a trophy and reflecting on how human exploitation of animals has remained sadly unchanged over the centuries. The rhinoceros is an animal that is now threatened with extinction precisely because of the value of its horn, which is worth more than gold on the black market.