Palazzo delle Esposizioni is going to present La Ruta de la Paz, a project devised by Costa Rican sculptor Jiménez Deredia involving the installation of nine major groups of sculpture in nine countries on the American continent, stretching from Canada to Tierra del Fuego via the United States, Mexico, Yucatan, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru and Chile - an ideal thread stretching across the Americas, linking peoples and legends, myths and traditions, lives and symbols. The idea for the project was spawned by the pre-Colombian stone spheres built by the ancient Boruca Indians in Costa Rica approximately 2000 years ago.
The symbology enshrined in the sphere describes the transmutation of matter, while the circle is a being seeking his true self. These elements point to a unitary and global view of existence and of the universe, harking back to the ancestral values that are a deeply rooted in every man. What Deredia has done is to analyze and reinterpret a symbol that predominates in many ancient pre-Colombian cultures, forging a link between the spherical elements of each of the nine sculpture groups and the main constellations in the countries involved by aligning the spheres with the stars.
The Palazzo delle Esposizioni will be hosting the architectural plans, scaled-down versions of the sculptures and monumental bronze works from the group of the Geneses, the pivotal focus of the nine Ruta de la Paz installations on the American continent. At the same time, 17 of the Costa Rican artist's monumental sculpture groups will be set up along the Via Sacra in the Imperial Fora. Also involved in the project are such signifcant public areas in Rome as Piazza Barberini and Piazza San Lorenzo in Lucina, the area in front of the Colosseum and the Music Park (Parco delle Musica).
A path of peace and unity joining the north and south of the world through a succession of archetypal shapes that hark back to the cosmic principle of the sphere, La Ruta de la Paz is a lot more than just an exhibition. It is the synthesis, or the generating nucleus, of a far vaster and more ambitious project for completion and dissemination over an incomparably broader sweep of time and space - a project which could only be launched in Rome, the universal and eternal capital and the unparalleled driving force behind shared values of every kind, whether Classical, Christian, Humanistic or symbolic.
After growing up in the ancestral environment of precolonial art, familiarizing in Florence with the Renaissance culture of measure and harmony, and contending with the most spectacular artistic palimpsest in the Western world (St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, where he produced a monumental sculpture for one of Michelangelo's niches in the apse in 2000), Jiménez Deredia is now showing his work at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni after completing a journey which has been extremely long in both geographic and cultural terms, but which he has always conducted under a banner of independence and resistance against the rules of the star system that dominates the world of contemporary art. The exhibition Deredia. La Genesi e il Simbolo at the Imperial Fora will complete the show held at palazzo delle Esposizioni.