There are around twenty new works that the artist Marcela Cernadas has created for the exhibition Manifesto di Sabbia, conceived by the Centro Studi del Vetro of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in conjunction with the festival The Venice Glass Week 2023.
For Cernadas, winner in 2022 of the tenth edition of the Glass in Venice Award, glass has now become a usual means of expression and to confirm this interest, the Center is exhibiting an unprecedented sheet of Murano glass made up of opaline white canes. Other works include numerous works on cotton paper – belonging to the white drawings series – a maquette, a video and a site-specific installation.
By combining these works, the intrinsic reasons for the exhibition itself are in fact brought together, which focuses on the different meanings of the concept of sand, understood as a chemical component used for the creation of glass, therefore present in the original pigments of the M.V.M glassworks. Cappellin. Kept hidden, it is said, underground, the hundreds of colored powders that belonged to the historic Murano furnace and used for the production of plates and windows have recently re-emerged, alongside some rare fragments of glass, which are now kept inside the new headquarters of the Glass Archive.
But sand is also the biblical symbol of creation, that is, the clay from which humanity is forged, and is then an impalpable and volatile element with an allegorical function with respect to our memory, which disperses and erases, as happens in the memorable story The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine author to whom the labyrinth located next to the new Centro Studi del Vetro is dedicated.
