NIGRO

Being in the belly of the gigantic shark, Pinocchio awakens:

“When he recovered his senses the Marionette could not remember where he was.
Around him all was darkness, a darkness so deep and so black
that for a moment he thought he had put his head into an inkwell.”

The Adventures of Pinocchio / C. Collodi 1883

Being in the belly of the giant shark looking for his father, Pinocchio finds himself in a darkness so deep that as if he has stuck his head in an ink-filled squid. While recovering in the Blue Fairy’s castle after having been hanged in the Great Oak, four rabbits black as ink come to carry him inside a coffin. The Fire-eater’s long beard is black as ink.

Nigro articulates the experience of blackness in Carlo Collodi’s book The Adventures of Pinocchio. It is an artwork about the metamorphoses of the wood piece that comes into the world with the willingness to become a real being, to be. In the story, the achievement of “being” occurs in the sculptural figure of a wood piece that, in constant near-death transformations, finally manages to solidify itself in an archetypal figure of human potential: the divine child.