Voice of the Verb to Have

Voce del verbo avere (Voice of the Verb to Have) – part of the solo show Voce del verbo avere, curated by Beatrice Merz and Valentina Bruschi at Palazzo Branciforte in Palermo – consists of the open jaws of a shark in which the artist has suspended a coin, inspired by the ritual of Charon’s obol, or the tradition of placing a coin in the mouth of the deceased so that they could hand it over to the ferryman of souls to gain access to the afterlife. The artist reappropriates ancient symbolism by using a Greek drachma from the 1930s, which has the same iconography as the ancient obol, with the earth’s mother goddess Demeter and the ear of wheat. Voce del verbo avere (Voice of the Verb to Have) is a visual metaphor for the concept of hunger, in which the artist associates two different meanings: hunger as a need and as an insatiable lust for power. The Greek currency refers to the economic crisis suffered by Greece in recent times, while the shark’s jaws refer to the capitalist savagery that spawned it.