The contemporary art exhibition “Mazzèn. Simone Scardino”, curated by Elena Isella, is part of Gallery Sweet Gallery, a curatorial and exhibition program that, through the visual arts, explores the relationship between nature, landscape, and society. It is promoted by the Municipality of Mariano Comense and the Associazione Amici dei Musei Città di Cantù e del suo Territorio, under the patronage of Camera di Commercio Como-Lecco, in collaboration with La Bottega and with the contribution of BCC Cantù.

The project by Simone Scardino (Venaria Reale, 1995) takes shape inside the Former Butcher’s shop F.lli Buzzi in Mariano Comense, a place steeped in memory, where the imagery of meat - ordered, packaged, separated from its animal origins - becomes the starting point for a critical reflection on the contemporary relationship between humans, the environment, and non-human life forms. In the context of an ever-deepening ecological crisis, in which nature is reduced to a resource and biodiversity to material to be optimized, the butcher’s shop becomes a concrete and powerful metaphor. In the butcher’s shop, the animal’s body is dissected and rendered undetectable. Like meat, the plant world appears as an artificial, packaged, neutral object. And, in a broader vision, Nature, which in the contemporary imagination is a product to be consumed, pacified, purified from the complexity of the ecological relationships from which it originates.

The exhibition, whose title (mazzèn) is a dialect term that identifies the person who once killed the pig, features cold storage crates with stratigraphies of soil (clay, stones, earth) and plant biomass (bark, branches, and leaves), two mosaics made of ceramic tiles featuring two details from two photographs by Lele Piazza (Galbiate, MEAB - Museo Etnografico dell’Alta Brianza, Archivio Lele Piazza), plant elements, photographic and documentary reproductions, and a film, the underlying theme of the exhibition. Through the reenactment of the procurement of goods, the film seeks to explore a vision of nature as processed, dissected, and finally exhibited.