LE PIANGENTI “Tutto il mio folle amore lo soffia il cielo.” (PP. PASOLINI)

curated by Carlo Orsini

Le Piangenti, declined in the feminine, assigns a gender to these works: weeping as emotional suffering, as a release of emotions, but not referring to feminine weakness as much as to the mourning lament of the prefiche (professional mourners) in the collective processing of grief, which takes place in the liminal phase of the deceased, between the world of the living and that of the dead. Historically, women have taken on this role of expressing pain through codified and ritual forms. Through weeping.

Le Piangenti, as some tree species are described in biology, such as the Weeping Willow or the Weeping Wisteria. Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his poem Il Glicine (The Wisteria): “You who brutally return (…) You lean over my reopened abysses, You scent virginally over my eclipses (…) My soul rages.”

The art of Marco De Sanctis does not contain political messages; it is simply “a witness to a deep thought, the visible image of an invisible truth”. Even though it may seem a sticky definition, we could call it poetic, in the most significant sense of the term.

For the Platea showcase and through a chemical reaction of salts (nitrates, copper sulfate, and mineral salts mixed with bronze powder and copper oxides) on paper, Marco De Sanctis commissions the Lodi rain to generate the form of clouds.


A form that, in its real-world equivalent, as René Thom states, “rises toward value-laden pregnances, up to the extreme emotional-symbolic chaos”. Contemplating clouds, beyond its connotation as a waste of time, gives us a morphological and dynamic vision of the passage of time; having our head in the clouds, beyond its connotation of being scatterbrained, immerses us in the flow of the theory of everything—something very dear to Platea.

The universe weeps, and its tears generate on paper a morphological vision—clouds—of that from which its weeping derives. Similarly, on the bronze casting of a fragment of the bust of the sculpture Le Piangenti, which recalls the classical model of Laocoön, two large agave leaves are implanted on its forehead, channeling rain onto the sculpture's eye sockets and thus allowing the formation of verdigris tears, generated by the reaction of rain with metallic oxides.

This sculpture will be exhibited during the inauguration of the show in the Platea showcase, in the courtyard adjoining the Civic Library of the Municipality of Lodi, at Via Fanfulla 2.

Marco De Sanctis' exhibition is the fourth episode dedicated to exploring the renegotiation of the concepts of nature/artificial and nature/culture, connecting them to the Lodi area through the lens of landscape anthropology, where natural elements become co-authors of the artistic work.


In Luca Boffi’s 2022 installation, artificial fog was used to compose an ever-changing landscape in the showcase, to the point of completely obscuring the view; in Fabio Roncato’s 2023 sculpture, the power of the river current was harnessed to form a mold of the momentary strength of the river by pouring molten wax into the water; in 2024, Mariateresa Sartori used the wind on the banks of the Adda River to “write” her work; in 2025, Marco De Sanctis uses meteorological precipitation as a morphogenetic and alchemical matrix for his work.