Pastificio Cerere Foundation is glad to present the personal exhibition by Pietro Ruffo, entitled I sei traditori della libertà. The show is the final step of the artist’s research on the figure of Isaiah Berlin and his concept of positive/negative freedom elaborated in the text Two concepts of freedom in 1958.
Ruffo historically proceeds in the formulation of this assumption, from 1700 passing through the principal steps of philosophy. Starting from the six lectures made by Berlin in 1952 for Oxford University and the BBC, in which the Russian philosopher traces six portraits of ancient philosophers of the French Revolution, Ruffo arrives to our age, offering a reflection of six modern luminaries on the concept of negative/positive freedom (prof. Giacomo Marramao, prof. Sebastiano Maffettone, prof. Giovanni Aldobrandini, prof. Eugenio Lecaldano, prof. Ian Carte, prof. Marco Santambrogio). They also try to elaborate a new concept of freedom for contemporary society.
The exposition is structured as a gallery of six big portraits of the old “enemies of freedom”, realized with pencil and carved paper that reproduces a sprawl of dragonflies recovering the six faces. The horizontal flight of the dragonflies and the fragility of their existence is the symbol of philosophical, political and social freedom in nature. The six interviews made by Pietro Ruffo to the contemporary philosophers are an important part of the work because they’re showed as “video portraits”.
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