Solo exhibition

Il Bestiario della Terra – Reggio Parma Festival 2022
curated by Cristiano Leone
APE Museo, Parma, Italy – July 7 – October 16, 2022

The exhibition presents the creative process of Lessico Animale a complex exploration and investigation of the relationship between Man and Animality through video projections, photographic prints, plaster casts and other objects related to the performance which took place over six immersive days with nineteen actors from the Casa degli Artisti at the Teatro Due in Parma in May 2022.

Yuval Avital’s Animal Lexicon, by exploring the active-dynamic nature of the universe, overcomes the illusory humanity-animality opposition, present from the very title as a paradox. The category of ‘lexicon’, as a properly human formulation, should in fact exclude – or dominate – that of ‘animality’. The solution to the apparent contradiction is to be found precisely in the medieval tradition of bestiaries, in which the massive project of the Bestiary of the Earth. In the Middle Ages, the animal is a sign with which to understand the liber naturae. Yuval Avital plumbs the ancestral archetypes in a ritual that places contemporaneity on a level that is both pre-human and post-human. He combines, in fact, two types of initiation, the artistic one – of the τέχνη – and the mystery one – of the μυστικός. In this perspective, human and animal enter into dialogue, never excluding each other. The result is a work-manifesto of the limen, of that border zone between performance art and theatre, between visual and performative. Like a tragedy, Lessico Animale consists of a prologue and a series of acts. The prologue documents the transformation, through photographs, videos, interviews, etc. Like any lexicon, it is itself destined for further transformations, depending on how it extends in space and time. Yuval Avital’s language, according to Roland Barthes’ famous formula, “is a skin”, the outward manifestation of an atavistic depth to which it adheres, on which it depends and nourishes itself, and for which it is also a zest, protection and epiphany.
Excerpt from the curatorial text by Cristiano Leone, curator