Noverca

A wolf pads through Rome in the near-darkness of lockdown. Deserted and uncanny, the city is crossed only by ambulances and police cars; otherwise it is the silence that speaks—and the sirens, with their inexorable logic.

In a video work, Filippo Riniolo captures what became the pandemic’s instant emblem: fear, abandonment, solitude, a community once again compelled into monadic life.

In the artist’s lexicon, Noverca is a wolf. The title draws on an archaic, Dantean word meaning “stepmother”—the unmotherly mother. The work leaves open a disquieting possibility: that nature itself has become a stepmother, withdrawing from its most favoured children. Its most urgent wager is to give form—perception, image—to that widely shared sensation of being betrayed by fate, by nature; of being left alone before an enemy.

The wolf, of course, is also she-wolf: Rome’s foundational sign, the emblem everyone knows—the city par excellence. But where does a city end up when its citizens are sealed inside their apartments, withdrawn from one another? The urbs unravels, thins, disappears. The she-wolf searches for Rome and finds only its empty streets. Perhaps she would speak to people—explain how one might relate to the animal world, what feelings, desires, and instincts we hold in common. Perhaps she seeks mutual inhabitation, a shared breath. Instead, she meets fear, which breeds further misunderstanding: solitude, distance, the widening of an already gaping interval.

The work also nods—clearly—to the wolf that once terrorised Gubbio and, brought into dialogue with a saint, ceased to be terrifying. It is one of the best-known miracles of Saint Francis: a parable from which we might have learned how to converse with nature, even in its ferocity, by asking who is truly more ferocious—those who deny their own nature, or those who affirm it and defend it.

Today that seemingly irrational gesture is everyone’s hope: to go and speak with the monster, to decipher and translate its language, to learn coexistence. The wolf of Gubbio becomes, by extension, the vaccine; the virus among us that stops harming us once it is understood—in every sense of the word. Understood, and received.

This video work embodies the pandemic without ever naming it. It speaks of anxiety, disorientation, and solitude with a precision that only an artist’s poetic intelligence could distil. Riniolo has long pursued this practice of lateral, deep translation of our dominant narratives: he does not stop at history, but studies it and returns it to us as a contemporary tutor—an instrument for reading the complexities of the present.

The work was realised with the support of the law firm of Nicola Ricciardi—tax lawyer, collector, specialist in Art Law, and member of the Executive Board of Arteprima no profit.

Text and curatorship by Francesco Cascino.