There is a wolf that guides the people of Bergamo. This is what we learn from the inscription on the front of the former oratory in Via San Tomaso. DIVO LUPO BERGOMATUM DUCI. “Divine Wolf, leader of the Bergamasques.” For those of us who have reread Aldo Leopold, it is a kind of epiphany. In the passage “Thinking Like a Mountain,” to be found in A Sand County Almanac, the American forest ranger reflects on the moment when, as a young man, he killed a she-wolf and saw “a green fire dying in her eyes.”
This event led him to understand the importance of this animal in maintaining the natural balance. Without predators such as wolves, grazing populations (such as deer) increase excessively, causing the depletion of entire ecosystems. “Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf,” writes Leopold, i.e. to understand it, to grasp its importance and meaning.
An archetype of wild nature, a leader of packs, a liminal creature between the forest and “civilization,” both feared and revered, exiled and mythologized, the wolf gave its name to the saint after whom the Oratory is named (San Lupo). For this space, Maurizio Cattelan has created Bones: a sculpture depicting an eagle on the ground. It is the contemporary transfiguration of an ancient symbol, the imperial eagle, traditionally associated with domination, verticality, and strength. But this eagle is fragile, lying slumped and wounded. A monument to collapse rather than to glory.
The work was inspired by another monument to a very different “leader”: the Duce featured on the commemorative cippus in Dalmine, marking the speech Benito Mussolini gave in 1919 to steelworkers on the “creative strike,” one of the founding acts of the Fascist movement. The eagle, which is now stored in the company warehouses, once stood there as an emblem of supreme authority.
But after the war, when the regime collapsed, the eagle was removed, stripped of its celebratory function, and transferred to the garden of the Dalmine summer camp in Castione della Presolana, at the foot of the most iconic mountain in the Orobie Alps. In that context, it shed all ideological connotations and took on a new meaning: that of wild nature, freedom of the skies, and high altitudes. It is here, in this symbolic paradox, that Cattelan finds the key to Bones.
Indeed, there is a third Duce in the story of Seasons, the exhibition conceived by Cattelan for the Bergamo community. He is Il Duce dei Mille (“The Duce of the Thousand”), as the inscription on the base of the nineteenth-century statue dedicated to Garibaldi in the center of the lower town roundabout reads. Cattelan chose this very statue, turning it into a pedestal, to place One: a child in a red jersey with his fingers clasped in the form of a pistol and seated astride the shoulders of the monumental Garibaldi, a nineteenth-century work by Cesare and Alberto Maironi da Ponte. Who is this “one”? A grandson on his grandfather’s shoulders? A modern-day Garibaldino? Or a little vandal making a mock of ancient values?
One speaks of generations, one of the key themes of our Biennale delle Orobie (previously presented in an editorial of mine a few months ago). The work may be read as an attempt to question the new generations with regard to memory, the contradictions of history, and the responsibilities of nations and governments before the conflicts of our time, be they social or environmental. One invites us to reflect on what kind of generational “unity” is still possible. A coexistence made up of differences, critical memory, and new potential.
Seasons opened the fourth cycle of Pensare come una montagna (“Thinking Like a Mountain”), a project created to reinterpret the relationship between art, nature, and the community from an ecological and territorial perspective. Here, Cattelan is an interpreter capable of manipulating historical memory and shared symbols, turning them into a terrain of doubt, play, and unease.
“Thinking like a mountain” also means looking from afar so as to see better. Understanding that symbols may be layered, shifted, and may contradict themselves. That the wolf may become a leader. That the imperial eagle may become a vulnerable body. And that between history and nature, endless cracks, fractures, and new possibilities open up.
Our task today is not to build new monuments, but to listen to the landslides. To acknowledge the debris, the remains, the bones. And from there, perhaps, begin to imagine another form of guidance: one not imposed, but shared. Not vertical, but terrestrial.
Lorenzo Giusti
