Non è strano dormire mentre la luna attraversa il cielo

Non è strano anche che si possa dormire, mentre la luna attraversa il cielo? (Isn’t it strange that one can sleep while the moon crosses the sky?), This phrase from Tommaso Landolfi’s Pietra Lunare begins with an alchemical creation leading to "another state of existence," made up of monstrous and exceptional creatures, all under a lunar vapor that silently oversees beings who appear only at night. The work celebrates the Bacchic archetypes of non-being, alongside Gurù, a guardian who loses her human traits and becomes a hybrid creature, half woman and half goat—emerging from the tangle with her goat-like legs; at the foot of the rock, a monstrous form lies stretched on its side, heavy and immobile, with long womanly legs and a beastly torso. Similarly, the work presented here aims to open the gateway to otherness, where rarefied shapes and inconsistent yearnings for matter reside. The dissolution of certainties appears as a deposit carried by a matter that is insubstantial, transforming and becoming something else. The germ of metamorphosis in Iodice’s work is initially synthesized and then, in a violent flow, comes to catalyze the real-unreal divide, by anagramming a passage—a flex point whose mathematical equation can only be solved by living through death. Here, in the dim, grayish light, that subterranean world takes shape, where Gurù, immersed in this other reality, inspects it and grants access. Everything gets tangled up, resulting in a mixture of human and non-human elements—human-made, yet foreign to humanity because it is ultimately undecipherable, and above all, unattainable. Is it a sharp gaze, a visionary state, a penetration into the nocturnal, the unconscious, the surreal? Here, the viewer, like Giovancarlo, the protagonist of Landolfi’s novella, is afraid but sees. He is afraid precisely because he sees, and thus, discovers the two goat’s forked feet. But is it possible that only he sees? Everyone else seems, or perhaps is, blind; or perhaps they want to be. Must one have the courage to see? Has the awareness of seeing death arisen when one sees Gurù the Goat? Is Gurù, sterile and lunar, what is seen from the other side of death?