The Idol

“Make us gods who will go before us”, asked the people. Therefore, the high priest collected their jewels and forged a golden statue and they worshipped it declaring that that was God. Thus begins the story of the Golden Calf in the Book of Exodus, an episode which has in time become the ultimate metaphor of idolatry. Such a powerful image that it overcame its religious interpretation to be adopted also in the secular perspective as an allegory of a fanatic and boundless faith in an object. The nature of such object is transcendent or immanent indifferently, what matters is the relationship of total subjection and of capitulation which men bestow to the work of other men, raising it to divine dignity. The totem which stands out at the centre of the mise-en-scene created by Lunardi is, indeed, an idol which arises from a completely secularized context but which, due to its immaterial nature, is lifted up to the nature of transcendent divinity which looms over its worshipers. The idol has no inner being whatsoever, it is only the cruel reflection of the image that the worshipers project in it, deprived of any spiritual value, made cynical and indifferent by its mechanical nature. It is nourished by the cannibal hunger of men that not only devour each other but they also finish up devouring themselves, because the idol they nourish, in the end, swallows them all up. This is the powerful and tragic vision of the current times Lunardi proposes, his vision of the society of the image which, sooner or later, as in a tragic and grotesque Uroboro, will consume itself. And, in doing so, it will deny its essence: that of the snake biting its tail, symbolizing that of eternity remains only an echo, and the result will be the pure and simple cannibalism.