From the wall behind, saltpetre emerges like white foam. Behind us, the footsteps of women and men parade on the uneven pavement, which is continuously wet by the water of the lagoon. By day the sun warms the work, by night the print sinks into the island's humidity. Gesto 4, permanently installed on the Giudecca Island in Venice, has no protection: water, wind, heat, rain and human gestures act on the print without any form of control.

The work, conceived by the collective as a continuous performative action, emerges chromatically from the wall behind it. The thermographic image reveals to us the skin of a reptile above the grass on the lawn. The chromaticity in front of our eyes testifies to a difference in temperature and creates the abstract portrait of a relationship that tells about us and the environment in which we find ourselves.

When talking about 'ecology', a theme also chosen by AMACI for the 18th Day of the Contemporary, it is necessary to go back to the etymology of this word. This concept draws its origin from oikos (home, family), and logìa (discourse, word, in the sense of study and treatment). If we wanted to be true to the meaning of the term, we would speak of 'ecology' as a science that deals with analysing the relationship between ourselves and the environment from which we are born and in which we live.

The work of plurale becomes, therefore, an invitation to open up, to dialogue and to know how to listen to everything around us: precisely, to restore that human degree of empathy that is lacking today.

With this project, the artists speak of the "sustainability of the human being" both towards his fellow human beings and towards the environment in which we live. Gesto 4, through the chromaticity of the thermographic image, is transformed into a device capable of observing the relationships between the living being and its context. The snake's scaly skin becomes the gateway to a deeper, inner process of analysis: reptiles, like all cold-blooded animals, base their survival on the exchange of heat with the environment in which they find themselves. The exchange is thus transformed into a human metaphor, where the passage of heat is that same process of microimitation that underlies the principle of empathy.
To understand and comprehend who one has in front of one, eliminating the differences between us and the other, become the principles of the manifesto reaffirming the need to empathise with the one who is different from us. Just as cold-blooded animals respectfully absorb the heat they need to live from the outside environment, so too the work integrates itself into the context where it has been installed.

Gesto 4 gives the community a moment of reflection, reminding us how contemporary art must and can be a vehicle for universal values.