Francesco Gennari La degenerazione di Parsifal (Natività) / The Degeneration of Parsifal (Nativity), 2017
Stainless steel, flour, butterflies
Variable dimensions tending towards the infinite
First created in 2005—in a cubic version—La degenerazione di Parsifal (Natività) / The Degeneration of Parsifal (Nativity) is an octagonal installation consisting of eight plates of stainless steel held together with clamps that imprison approximatively 80 kg of flour and a number of butterfly eggs. Once installed in the exhibition space, the clamps are opened, the plates carefully removed and displayed on the floor around the immaculate octagon of flour. With time, the flour will be affected by gravity and entropy and will start disaggregating, reproducing at a smaller scale the forces at stake in nature, while the eggs will hatch and potentially give birth to small butterflies. Francesco Gennari regards La degenerazione di Parsifal (Natività) as a total work of art, a metaphor of life and death, in which the artist himself acts as a demiurge-both creator and destructor-deciding over the transformation and becoming of all things.