COSTANTINO CIERVO

Costantino Ciervo is a multimedia artist who builds sculptural objects and installations using mainly video, photography, and electronics. Ciervo’s work revolves around central themes like freedom, power, information, and repression and takes a critical look at modern society. His installation “The Ten Commandments” shows the silhouette of a running man surrounded by ten words in red neon letters that Italian manager Luca Cordero di Montezemolo identified as formative parameters for a business-oriented society. But because these values are targeted at individualization, personal gain, and the maximization of profits, they undermine values that define a social society, like altruism, participation, solidarity, love, exchange, and cooperation. The figure embodies the pace and effort that these “commandments” inflict upon us and the way they prevent us from finding peace. As early as 1921, Walter Benjamin referred to capitalism as a religion in which there is “no day that would not be a holiday in the awful sense of exhibiting all sacred pomp – the extreme exertion of worship.”

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artist’s biography