In gran multitudine
Stone, Casu Marzu (Sardinian cheese containing live maggots), one thousand posters 150 x 100 cm each
Environmental dimensions Church Chiesa del Carmine, incorporated in the Museum of Palazzo Lanfranchi. Project promoted by the Cassa di Risparmio di Calabria and Basilicata Foundation on the occasion of the exhibition L’albero della cuccagna curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, 2015.
In gran multitudine is a site-specific installation (A large lump of cheese teeming with live maggots is placed in a basin carved in a block of stone) devised for the city of Matera, the capital of rural culture and symbol of the Italian post war national shame as well as being the European Capital of Culture in 2019. This work was inspired by the story of a Friulian farmer burnt at the stake for heresy in 1599, as discovered and then narrated by the historian Carlo Giunzburg in his 1976 book The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller. Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, had elaborated an extraordinary personal cosmogony: he believed that animate life was not created by God, but that derived from inanimate life. An evolutionist vision that originated from a primordial chaos of earth, air, water and fire forming an inchoate mass, like a lump of cheese from which worms, namely God and the Angels, were born in gran multitudine (in great multitude).