Milan, November 4 (askanews) – Looking to antiquity and its artifacts not only to reconstruct the past, but also to envision a future based on the history and humanity that those same objects ultimately tell us about. Fondazione Prada in Milan presents the exhibition "Global Antiquity," dedicated to the cultural interactions between Africa, Asia, and Europe between 600 BC and 1000 AD.
C. A research project, the third chapter of a broader reflection by the foundation on the theme of the classic, curated by Salvatore Settis, Anna Anguissola, and Chiara Ballestrazzi, which speaks to us of another global world. "The globalization we experience," Professor Settis told askanews, "is a globalization that goes from top to bottom, top down as they say, where there are leading countries, the richest countries, they are the multinationals, large financial centers and then there are all the others who lag behind.
Ancient globality is not the same thing. Globality was a slow process, not as fast as ours, slow, sparse, it was an insubstantially symmetrical and equal process, horizontal, dominated by the goods that were needed. Ivory had to be imported from India or Africa, black pepper had to be imported from India, and was very important for Roman cuisine. But it was also dominated by mutual curiosity, because with the black pepper also came small works of art, works of Indian art, and works of Roman art returned from there. These objects convey, beyond their beauty and archaeological significance, a more subtle feeling. They are testimonies of what has been, but also of what has not been or what we have lost.
Like the great Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban, or like objects that should have come from Ukraine, but instead there are only a few empty display cases. "These objects speak," added Salvatore Settis, "these objects have a memory, there is a memory of things, this is a statement that underpins this entire exhibition, which supports it. There is a memory of things, things are capable of speaking, naturally we must make them speak using an archaeological method, and a key aspect of this archaeological method is the seriality implicit in objects." Serenity itself, in its very connection to real human life, is one of the aspects on which Fondazione Prada's investigation of the classics has focused. And today, walking through the Podium of the Milanese space, one can experience the feeling of being alive in another place and another time, accompanied, for example, by letters engraved in many different languages, which are proof and a tale of what we have been. And even the display of Rem Koolhaas's studio is part of the exhibition's beautifully encyclopedic and imperfect narrative. "This is an exhibition of contexts, of relationships," Chiara Ballestrazzi told us, "so we studied in detail with OMA, including how the pieces should be combined, how they should be displayed, to suggest, through proximity and the display itself, the relationships of transformation, symmetry, and movement of all the objects we have and the concepts we wanted to explore." These concepts are contemporary and necessary, because when we talk about global antiquity, we're talking about migration, dialogue, overcoming differences through curiosity and cultures—that is, ultimately, we're talking about everything we lack today. (Leonardo Merlini)
Askanews