Description
A seated female figure, wrapped in a sand-colored dress, rises in suspension. Her blonde hair frames a serene, almost ecstatic face. Beneath her, a shadow takes shape: a black snake that unfurls and coils, drawing spirals and waves on the gray floor.
Potnia Theròn Serpent represents the ancient Lady of the Animals in her most archaic and symbolic form: that of the serpent, a chthonic animal linked to the earth, regeneration, and primordial feminine power. In many Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures, the goddess is depicted with serpents in her hands—guardian of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, mediator between the underworld and the surface.
Federica Barcellona constructs the image through photography, graphic manipulation, and artificial intelligence, merging the real body and symbolic vision into a single, contemporary iconography of the sacred feminine. The woman does not dominate the serpent, nor is she threatened by it: she is in relationship with it.
The gray wall behind her—marked with stains, scratches, and stratifications—recalls Federica’s research into other spaces, urban margins, and passageways. Here too, as in the entire Potnia Theròn series, the degraded space is not abandonment but sacred territory: the place where the divine can still manifest itself, where the ancient can reemerge in the form of vision.
Potnia Theròn Serpent is an icon of ancestral female power, a portrait of strength that does not oppose its own shadow but dances it, inhabits it, recognizes it as a necessary part of the self.
