Malefica Semenza

Luigi Presicce

Il Campo dei Giganti (Villaggio Boncore, Nardò, Lecce)

July 21, 2026

Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the ground to the Lord, while Abel for his part brought the firstlings of his flock and their fat portions. The Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.

Genesis 4:3–6

Man of my time / You are still the one of the stone and the sling / […] this blood smells as on the day / when the brother said to the other brother: “Let us go into the fields”

Quasimodo, Man of My Time, 1945

 

Over the centuries, the figure of Cain has enjoyed an inexhaustible resonance, making an exact accounting of every artistic and literary interpretation impossible. The generative power of the biblical myth lies in its archetypal force, which constantly regenerates itself in conversation with the contemporary moment – and thus with the stages of self-collective awareness that inhabit it. What could be more relevant, still and always, than the first murder of the human lineage; and to what extent do we feel addressed by this descent?

Malefica Semenza (“Malevolent Seed”) is the title of Luigi Presicce’s performance at Il Campo dei Giganti, a site already semantically and aesthetically charged, carrying a message that the artist amplifies through the thematic choice of the original fratricide for his intervention. The lineage of the “malevolent seed” is rooted in a primary psychic and theological flaw: we are the heirs of a parental pair – Adam and Eve – already neuroticized by the trauma of the serpent and the loss of fusional union with the One.

Heirs to these first two parents, the firstborn Cain and his brother Abel move within a bond marked by rejection: the divine lack of favor toward Cain’s plant offering remains a blind act of arbitrary will, an unfathomable mystery that resists all interpretation. This refusal triggers a sacrificial and competitive mechanism: Cain sees in his brother the incarnation of an unattainable ideal-ego, and the aphasic Abel becomes a victim already designated by silence. Thus, a profound logic is activated – omnipresent throughout the Scriptures – where the neurosis of guilt transforms sacrifice into an economy of exchange.

Fratricide is not a simple act of individual cruelty, but a tragic ritual attempt to shield the subject from the vertigo and anxiety of free will. Christ will attempt to evaporate this accounting of blood by replacing it with mercy; yet, Presicce’s action in the contemporary realm asks us brutally: do we live in merciful times? In the postmodern era, following the collapse of the great metanarratives, the Shadow of God in whose name sacrifice is carried out has changed disguise, taking form in the simulacra of extractivist neoliberalism—upon whose altar the union between humans, and of humans with the Earth, is sacrificed daily.

If the collective unconscious operates structurally through repetition – a mechanism that becomes deadly when reduced to a mere copy, yet reveals itself as generative when producing difference – Presicce embodies a radical stance: he removes the repetition of fratricide from its passive dimension to elevate it into pure affirmation. This is not the first time the artist has staged Cain and Abel, but he reminds us that the repetition of the act is never a mere replica. Recalling Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and Gilles Deleuze’s reading of it, difference reveals itself as true alterity, a real simulacrum, only when it keeps intact its relationship with the dark abyss, with the abyssal vertigo of the indeterminate that returns – and can only return – in the act of differing from itself.

Presicce carries out an alchemical mimesis that freezes profane time: his tableau vivant – the chosen form for an artist who is inextricably visual and performative – crystallizes a single fragment of the scene’s unfolding: the moment immediately preceding the murder. It halts the mobility of life to grant the bodies the plasticity of a tragic fate. His compositions seem to abdicate the motion of the present to interrogate it more deeply, drawing with skill and grace from an inexhaustible iconographic reservoir that ranges – from the choice of subjects to the production of props – from art history to the rites of Mediterranean culture. Here, these elements are grafted in the form of a vision (showing) which, in Genesis, is instead reported through dialogue or monologue (telling), set within a non-narrative framework that allows for an icastic archetypal extraction.

The artist does not offer us a repentant Cain, nor the titanic rebel of Romantic-Byronic tradition; Presicce’s Cain is absolute, suspended in a liminal and metaphysical dimension in the instant immediately preceding the tragic unfolding of the human race. Within the eversive immobility of the scene – which also mirrors the monumentality of the Giants of the Field, sublimated in lime by Ulderico Tramacere to exalt the plastic and mute power of the trunk-witnesses – the entire consciousness of the spectator is set into motion, forced to reckon with their own destiny, with their own choices.

The nexus between Presicce’s action and the framework of Il Campo dei Giganti is not incidental, but causal: by choice, the Field has renounced the logic of profit to become a workshop of social art and community. It is the exact location in which to question the origins of human occupations: Abel’s animal husbandry and Cain’s agriculture. Presicce engages in a deep dialogue with this dichotomy in the composition of his living picture, from the selection of props to everything that contributes to the site-specific scenography. If Saint Augustine viewed Cain as the initiator of earthly cupiditas, the first founder of cities and the father of technical-scientific progress, a “double accounting” emerges both in Cain’s gesture and in God Himself – an atrocity that is simultaneously a foundation: from the blood spilled on the earth, civilization sprouts, giving rise to arts, crafts, and technology.

The operation of Malefica Semenza thus consists in revealing the violent root of our own actions within the landscape. The farmer who alters the land is the father of contemporary economic man; we are his lineage, the children of the one who fenced the garden and decreed, in the long run, its exploitation and death. The political urgency of the action resides precisely in the ability to inhabit cultural apocalypse. Evoking Ernesto de Martino’s construct of the loss of the sense of living faced with the loss of one’s world – also in dialogue with the paralysis of Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism – the dialogue with Presicce questions the possibility of inhabiting the devastation of Xylella without yielding to the allure of cultural marketing.

The furious activity of contemporary man is an existence of accelerated speed, an extractive drive that consumes and desertifies. To this predatory motion, which the Field opposes, Presicce grafts the discipline of his immobility, amplifying its message. The rhythm of the tableau vivant thus acts as a biopolitical sabotage, halting profane time to reactivate the latent memory of the sacred and place us back in contact with the wounded earth. It is no coincidence that Chapter 4 of Genesis precedes the chapter dedicated to the Great Flood (Chapter 6), necessary to purify the earth of corrupt people in order to seek a model of integral ecology.

The work thus becomes an invocation of terrestrial regeneration as a biological necessity, echoing the lines of Mariangela Gualtieri’s polyphonic Cain (2011): “Slow down his pace / give him the intelligence of the flower / make him save the earth from himself / May he make it fertile again” (90). The context rejects entertainment to become a ritual of awareness for a civilization that has reached the twilight of a mode of conduct – on the edge of a new flood or desert – where immobility becomes a mechanism to stave off mass suicide.

In this ritual stasis, the audience witnesses the primordial murder; Presicce, who often conceives his works for a single spectator at a time, inviting them to step into the scenic space to share a secret or feel part of a revelation, here expands the action into an initiatory journey for small groups. The tableau vivant interrupts the mad rush of the Cainite lineage to fix the viewer’s gaze, handing them an unavoidable choice between silence, complicity, or the assumption of ethical responsibility. In the very instant before the fatal blow, it once again places the spectator before the anxiety – mistreated by fatalistic disenchantment – of free will. Bringing the first fratricide in the history of Western culture among the whitewashed olive trees of the Field means performing a non-consolatory rite, capable of extracting Xylella from local news reports and consigning it to the history of our structural violence against nature and against our brothers and sisters.

“Since the time of Cain and Abel, the human race has been divided, and unfortunately we ended up being the lineage of Cain, taking a fork in the road that left no escape”: in this statement by Presicce lies a lucid verdict on the state of art and the contemporary condition. Faced with this original fracture, the artist reclaims the political necessity of a public and participatory art, reminding us that artists should constitute the “cultural lung” of a country rather than being reduced to “alveoli” that, ignoring one another, deny the possibility of a single, great shared breath.

His entire trajectory as an artist, as well as a curator and creator of collaborative projects – from co-founding Lu Cafausu, Fondazione Lac o Le Mon, and the Scuola di Santa Rosa with Francesco Lauretta, to the Accademia dell’Immobilità, the Simposio di Pittura, and the recent ecosystem of the Thalassa Gallery with Salvatore Baldi in Porto Cesareo (his collaborations are numerous) – bears witness to a radically community-oriented practice. Presicce’s approach is an openness that fears neither confrontation nor contamination, but instead chooses the relationship with the other as a methodology, refusing to entrench itself in sclerotic identities.

It is precisely within this idea of community that his action is grafted today into Il Campo dei Giganti: not as an “event”, but as an authentic sharing of an urgency – grounded in the conviction that the artistic device can serve as a bulwark against symbolic divestment, relational drought, and cultural apocalypse.

Malefica Semenza by Luigi Presicce, Il Campo dei Giganti, July 21, 2026. Performance with Luigi Presicce, Keith Boadwee. Music by Diletta Fachechi. Il Campo dei Giganti, community art project by Ulderico Tramacere. Text by Chiara Agagiù.