Description
A female figure stands motionless, wrapped in a black dress that falls vertically like a column. Around her, the floor opens up: branching cracks, abandoned metal chains, matter crumbling and decomposing. The wall behind her is worn by time, marked by stains and layers that speak of abandonment and passage.
Potnia Theròn – a title that recalls the ancient Lady of the Animals, an archaic Mediterranean deity linked to power over wild nature, fertility and death – is expressed here in her Scorpio version, a zodiac sign linked to transformation, regeneration, and the confrontation with darkness.
Federica Barcellona constructs the image through photography, graphic manipulation, and artificial intelligence, superimposing planes of reality and vision to create a contemporary iconography of the sacred feminine. The figure is not a victim of the ruined space: she is its guardian, its mistress, a central element that holds together what is disintegrating.
The chains on her sides—a symbol of imprisonment but also of an archaic bond—and the circular crack beneath her feet evoke a ritual circle, a threshold between worlds. The woman does not flee: she remains standing, facing forward, with her hands raised in a gesture that is both invocation and welcome. She is the contemporary Potnia: no longer a tamer of beasts, but a guardian of ruins, mistress of abandoned spaces and forgotten memories.
The work engages with Federica’s long-standing research on the peripheries, other spaces, and places of passage —territories that in her work become symbolic devices for interrogating identity, power, and transformation. Here, space is not just a backdrop, but the very body of the narrative: decay becomes beauty, the margin becomes the center, the end becomes the origin.
Potnia Theròn Scorpio is a portrait of silent resistance, an icon of feminine strength who inhabits the threshold between life and death, construction and dissolution, without ever giving in.
