Ugo Schiavi’s sculptures are presented as fragments of bodies eroded by time and destined for future archeologists. The artist molds and grafts contemporary elements to the glorious and petrified statuary in order to weave together the historical archive and the collective memory.
For the parvis of the Hôtel de Ville, Ugo Schiavi appropriated the bronze sculpture The Triumph of the Republic, located on the Place de la Nation and, particularly, the allegory entitled The Genius of Liberty. This emblematic character simultaneously evokes, through its body language, both the Statue of Liberty and Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix, as well as a demonstrator raising their arm in solidarity or ready to throw a Molotov cocktail. Although immobilized, his work seems to be floating, even incomplete; it outlines the manner with which reality is constructed through overlapping and anachronisms, in a search – at once insurrectional and militant against a backdrop of ruins – towards new worlds.
Ugo Schiavi (France) is in residence at the Cité internationale des arts.