Emiliano Maggi. Water Spell

The heart of the performance was the Arno, transformed by the artist into a sort of stage on which to stage his language that interweaves music, sculpture and choreography. In a very exceptional way, Maggi has also decided to involve the Corteo Storico Fiorentino and I Renaioli in this performative staging. Accompanied by a procession of trumpets and drums, on board a Maggi boat he traveled backwards along the Arno, starting from the Ponte alla Carraia and passing under Palazzo Corsini (headquarters of the BIAF – Florence International Antiques Biennial), up to to arrive at the Ponte Vecchio. This nòstos, which is also metaphorical, conceals the artist’s source of inspiration, contained in the history of the city’s art, in its public monuments, in its iconography and myths. Through a completely personal expressive language, Maggi reworks the ancient representations of tritons such as those that decorate the late sixteenth-century Fountain of Neptune in Piazza della Signoria or the frescoes by Vasari in the Sala degli Elementi in Palazzo Vecchio. Reviving Renaissance and classical myths and tales seems to dominate the inspiration of the artist, who is not new to forms of chronological, thematic and iconographic hybridization in which, for example, the human merges with the animal, the plant world with the marine one.