“Mites Terram Possident,” a new mural of religious proportions in Italy, marks artist Gonzalo Borondo’s “return to the streets,” through an intervention organized by the Wall In Art Project. Completed at the end of October 2018 in acrylic, the viewers will find the mural on an existing building’s facade “overlooking Piazza Casari” in the small community of Malegno, situated in Lombardy’s Valcamonica. The epic mural seeks to honor the Valcamonica’s UNESCO-designated status as a World Heritage Site, which tourism site Visit Italy explains, was granted for its historic rock carvings in 1979.
Visit Italy continues to explain that the valley “takes its name from the Camuni people, a population that lived in the zone during the Iron Age” in approximately 1,000 B.C. “The 250,000 rock engravings make the valley one of the largest petroglyphic collections in the world,” and were created over “the course of 8,000 years, from the Mesolithic period until the Roman and Medieval Ages.”
Honoring such a prolific and important landmark of historical richness is no small feat, and Borondo handles this weighty task with the appropriate reverence. A statement released by the artist explains that he found inspiration in “the act of digging a surface and leaving a mark, and the awareness that nature is not only the source of spiritual research, but also the archetype of his way of living and building space.” Borondo explores his work. “Mites Terram Possident” gains its title from Malegno’s own motto, and incorporates numbers disparate elements into one cohesive mural “through a process of absorption, elaboration, technical research and restitution.”
A cave found near the town constitutes the overarching central piece of “Mites Terram Possident”. The viewer’s eye then “expands following the rules of a frontal perspective,” to find that this entirely natural element is nestled into a grand scheme of columns and arches, comprising a proud and beautiful nave. This setting though, fades back to the pre-existing facade of the building upon which it is painted, perhaps symbolizing the current stage in humanity’s evolving relationship with its surroundings.
“Mites Terram Possident” also uniquely features the population’s participation, as its “lower part was instead treated and prepared” such that the Camuni children “could work and mark the work in a process in continuous continuity with the ancient inhabitants of Valcamonica.” This crucial decision allowed the next generation of Camuni citizens to intimately become one with their ancestral roots, partaking in this tradition of engraving on their first day of school.
Wall In Art is an ongoing project that “stems from the intuition and the will of the Valle Camonica Cultural District to correlate two forms of art, very distant in time, but both oriented to ‘telling’ in a public space, life in its daily unfolding,” according to Valmonica’s tourism website. In planning and selecting artists for interventions, the organization maintains its goal to facilitate the creation of public art that ties the past with the present and future beyond. The project elaborates upon the valley’s history by writing “a new chapter of history started by the ancient inhabitants of Valcamonica with the rock carvings.”
In his statement, Borondo concludes “the presence of this great variety of signs, symbols and their stratification and the highly expressive pictorial approach transform the work into a painting open to different levels of reading and interpretation.” With the mountains that surround the Valcamonica looming in the background, the beauty of this great unfathomable mystery of our existence stands absolute.
