Artist: Flavia Bigi
Artwork: travertine Installation. “Nine are the Muses”, 2024
Measurements: diameter 900 cm circa

Specially designed by artist Flavia Bigi for the gardens of the island of San Servolo, the installation NOVE SONO LE MUSE cradled by the bucolic calm of the lagoon, stands like a sanctuary dedicated to culture, the arts and forward-thinking. In fact, the Nine Muses, born from the union of Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of the Greek Olympus and personification of memory, are deities considered by birth to be capable of knowing the past, present and future memory of the world and its creatures. The circular arrangement of the dice forms an open ancestral constellation, where earth and sky are reconciled, inviting free and tolerant dialogue towards new frontiers of knowledge. In fact, the nine dice that make up the work are engraved with the pronouns "I", "you" and "we" in the languages of the students who attend the Universitas; they call for careful reflection on the spaces of language and the relationship with the non-self. 

 And although they appear to us as petrified, embodied in travertine, the Muses are by no means dead or inert. On the contrary, it is possible to perceive the many languages of the globe engraved on them: they enchant us with their whispers from the depths of the stone, which recall that Sorte, Tuke, who rules everything in the world. It is she who often decides the encounters of men and poets, but it is we, as a collective, who can change our destinies. The perfect Platonic idea of the cube, a static and solid geometric figure, is transformed into a dice, where the rounding of the corners embodies the idea of dynamics in its absence. The whisper  of the Muses resounds like an echo to the various cultures that meet here and which, in their diversity, contribute to reflecting on the fragility of the contemporary world in order to imagine a better global future.