Le opere sono state realizzate con il supporto della Fondazione Merz, Torino; Fondazione Sicilia, Palermo.
The works created by the artist for the former Monte dei Pegni di Santa Rosalia stem from the concept of economy, starting from the etymological decomposition of the term into oikos (home, understood as family, but also goods and communities) and nomos (rule): at this ex pawn shop people were forced to commit family assets (oikos), to try and accomplish the rules imposed by the state and the community and to meet the basic needs of subsistence (nomos). These two terms represent the common conceptual element in every work on display, along with the themes of money, food and hunger. The ambiguity of money, which on the one hand frees a person from being a slave but, on the other, creates new slavery and is the only mediation between opposites: abundance and absence. The relationship between food and money is inseparable, hunger is food, economic instability leads to insufficient money, but money is not edible. Money depends on access to food, a primary need for the existence of the human being: it is therefore hunger in, Voce del verbo avere, the trigger to activate analogies and dissonances, relationships between fullness and emptiness, wealth and poverty, indigence and security, nurturing and abstinence, inclusion and exclusion. Another term underlying all the research is transition, like the transformation from one form of existence to another, understood in the meaning proper to the function of the pawn shop, that of converting personal items into cash.
The works was produced with the support of Fondazione Merz, Turin and Fondazione Sicilia, Palermo.