The Journey is a performance of a ship navigating a GPS content-related route inspired by time, history and current geopolitical data in an area between Italy, Malta, Tunisia, Libya. The narrative is centred on the decision and consequences of dropping a 20-ton marble block awarded to the artist by the iconic Michelangelo quarry in Carrara, Italy, yet left untouched. Rossella Biscotti uses the block as a mechanism to unpack the political, economic and environmental layers of a complex body of water.
Origin of the project
The Journey was born from a prize received in 2010 at the International Biennial of Carrara. The prize consisted of a large block of marble extracted from the Michelangelo Quarry, the historic quarry of the Renaissance sculptors. At the time, she was doing research in Lampedusa, which she was already the main landing point for migratory flows.
So she was often crossing the Mediterranean for my research and from there came the idea of releasing this block of marble into the centre of the sea. From this simple idea a mechanism was born to explore that area on different levels, imagining the Mediterranean as a stratification of historical, political, geographical and geological meanings. Until 2016, she composed a series of maps of the area, ranging from the division of licences between oil and gas companies to the numerous military operations, from geological maps to maps of cables, wrecks, etc., all of which I was able to do. The Journey culminated in May 2021 in the voyage of a ship from Malta across the central Mediterranean for three and a half days following a route of GPS points, resulting from the research and mapping carried out, to a point where they released the 20 ton block of marble into the sea.