The artist Agnese Galiotto (Chiampo, 1996) transforms a wall in the historic center of Almenno San Bartolomeo into a visual narrative full of suggestion, exploring the deep relationship between human beings and nature.
The fresco, created using traditional techniques, unfolds on a wall overlooking the town’s central square. Its triangular composition echoes the silhouette of Monte Albenza in the background, which seems to continue seamlessly into the painting itself. This shape becomes the foundation for a visual narrative in which a flock of birds—composed of dozens of different species—moves from the peaks down toward the plain, while others observe from below, hidden among the thick leaves of an agave plant. At the heart of the plant, hands emerge, forming gestures that suggest, on one hand, the precise scientific practice of bird ringing, and on the other, the intimate and everyday act of picking a flower. In this interplay of images, conjoined daisies—double flowers on a single stem—become a metaphor for the artist’s research: images of union and ambivalence, speaking of fragility and resilience, but also of seemingly irreconcilable forms of coexistence.
The dominant color, a warm and deep brick tone, recalls not only the ancient plasterwork of the village and the autumn woods, but also the artist’s personal memories of night journeys across Europe during her years of study, where artificial lights seemed to slice through mountains like tongues of fire. This vision is translated into the fresco through poetic, suspended images, where boundaries dissolve. And yet, while borders and crossing zones may be points of interruption or arrest for humans, they become continuous corridors for migratory birds—linking different geographies and dissolving the very notion of national borders, offering instead the image of a unified, ever-moving landscape.
In a land historically tied to hunting, The Mountain Does Not Exist offers a new, non-romanticized way of relating to the animal world. Migratory birds become symbols of a fragile but constantly moving ecosystem, of a landscape that unites rather than divides, opening itself to new possibilities for listening, care, and coexistence.
