Sound art, Sculpture, Score for the Reggio Parma Festival 2022.
Exhibition curated by Chiara Canali and Camilla Mineo.
Il Bestiario della Terra, Reggio Parma Festival 2022, Marchi Palace, Parma, Italy, September 10th to October 30th

As part of the macro-work created by the Italian-Israeli author Yuval Avital titled “ Il Bestiario della Terra”, project of the year of Reggio Parma Festival 2022, Persona is the third exhibition and represents the investigation on maturity, after the previous two about childhood, with Anatomie Squisite (Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia), and adolescence, with Lessico Animale. Prologo (APE Museum of Parma).
After questioning himself about "what is a body, what is an organ?", and after having explored the authentic and profound essence of the human being, in an attempt to bring out his instinctive and animalistic origins, Avital takes a step forward in its kaleidoscopic investigation, trying to define those boundaries between the human presence and its definition in space and time, which make our species so unique and different from any other living being.
The exhibition bears witness to a parallel and dreamlike path, composed by ten rooms, that traces an allegorical framework of the concept of 'Persona', meant primarily as the reading of the others, memory and the passage from the truthful intimate microcosm to the public and social one.
The Italian term persona comes from the Latin verb personare, formed by per = through + sonare = resonate, referring to the actors of classical theater who "spoke through" the wooden mask they wore on stage. Persona therefore in the past meant mask.
Opposing to the generic concept of "human nature" with which are identified all the beings from the same species, the concept of persona underlines singularity: the set of qualities, traits and identity of each individual.
Starting from these assumptions, Avital has focused its research in the context of the ongoing reflection on human nature and, as the mask allows everyone, hiding it, to express the deepest truths, the real "self" and consequently the primordial, instinctive and animalistic soul enclosed in each of us, it has tried to identify or open different channels of communication with the world.
Not by chance, at the center of the exhibition are the famous singing masks by Yuval Avital, one of the most important corpus of the artist's sound works, created in collaboration with Tuscan artisans (in 2019 on the occasion of the monographic exhibition Nephilìm, at the Marino Marini Museum of Florence, and presented in 2021 in Milan in the site-specific installation Mikvé, at the Bagni Misteriosi in Milan), Avital's sound masks contain a strong underlying symbolic meaning from which mystery, artifice and ritual emerge.
