Metamagic

The PAV Living Art Park by Turin presents an extensive solo exhibition dedicated to Claudio Costa, one of the most singular and least explored artists on the Italian scene of the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition, entitled Metamagic and edited by Marco Scotini, explores the central corpus of Costa's work around his founding obsession: the relationship between material culture, biological memory e anthropological origin. The artist's research developed in an autonomous and radical direction, defined by Costa himself as “work in regress”: a journey back to the origin of the human that mixes instruments of the’ethnographyof the palaeontology and thealchemy.

Along a path that sees the’archivethe museum and the rite as places of manifestation of the living, the exhibition brings together heterogeneous works by the 1970sincluding tables, showcases, installations e photographic series. Costa does not merely represent nature, but uses it as a sign system and matter that bears traces of the biological time, using organic materials such as slate, clay, wax, bones and plant elements. The exhibition is divided into three main thematic areas: Resurrected anthropology (dedicated to the personal room at Kassel of ’77), the Museum of Man and the Monteghirfo Museum of Active Anthropology. The exhibition emphasises Costa's role as a pioneer capable of anticipating today's central questions on ecology e biodiversity, integrating the logic of ritual as an alternative cognitive tool to western rationality.