Velimna, Pietas Mundi

Description

The figure’s skin is the colour of the moon – that cold, ancient blue-grey that Velimna uses for her Fanusie, the moon-women of the Lunazioni collection. She holds the Earth in her arms the way one holds a sick child: with tenderness, with apprehension, with that care that does not run dry even when there is nothing left to do. The globe is real, recognisable in its continental masses, but it is burning, smoking, losing water. A penguin rests upon it: a creature of the poles, a silent symbol of a balance that is breaking apart.

In the background, the cosmos: stars, comets, planets rotating in indifference. The lunar figure looks away, with the gaze of someone observing from a longer and more ancient perspective. That of the feminine as a custodial force, not a dominating one. That of the lunar archetype that Velimna explores throughout her practice: the feminine principle as cycle, as care, as the capacity to hold pain without dissolving into it.
Pietas Mundi is a Surritratto that is political in the deepest sense of the word. The climate crisis here is not an abstract theme: it is a body held in arms, watched as it dims, still being protected. The figure’s red nails are the only warm note in a composition dominated by cosmic blue.