THE BOX
3 x 3 x 2.50 m
Metal and Fabric

Born as a project under the patronage of the minister of culture of United Arab Emirates Nahyan bin Mubarack al Nahyan, “The Box” is an installation that bridges classical mythology with contemporary understanding. The lightbox invites visitors to enter and experience an intimate journey of humanity by exhaling the content of Melanie’s drawings on the outside, a Nordic style almost like Dürer’s, where the stroke becomes the protagonist and stands out becoming an incisive and satisfied sign. Through the crystalline transparency of Greek temples to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it’s an attempt to propose the harmony and beauty of the human being as a central reason of existence. By dipping a calligraphy pen in Indian ink as in ancient time, enjoying the ink that flows out of the nib as if blood were coming out of her finger, Melanie overpasses the representation to reach a symbolic message. Beyond contemporary destruction and rage, it’s an homage and an act of love, but at the same time a provocation and an invitation to meditate on our modern times.


THE BOX, Zeus’s gift to Pandora

Furious about Prometheus stealing the divine fire, Zeus decides to punish him and his beloved creation: the human race. He orders the creation of a lovely maiden, Pandora, to whom the gods offer grace and every sort of virtue. She possesses a vase given to her by Zeus, with the order to leave it closed forever. But, driven by curiosity, Pandora disobeyed. She opened the box and out came evil spirits, the woes of the world: old age, jealousy, sickness, madness and vice. All of which fell on humanity.
Thus the box is our apotheosis. The cosmogony of a universal delirium, the final judgement. Beauty and its opposite: war and death, the cycle of life.
An epic call to embrace humanity’s greatness and its fragility.
But Pandora also signifies the total gift. Thus in this tragic cosmogony, in this alternation of good and evil, rests our salvation: as spirits, we are destined to live in the flesh to overcome our human limits with suffering and death and rise to a superior dimension of liberation.