L'Africa delle meraviglie. Arti africane nelle collezioni italiane. [Edizione Italiana e Inglese]

The catalogue presents African artworks held in private Italian collections, most of which have never been exhibited before, togheter with essays by leading specialists in the field.
Masks, altar figures, fetishes, and objects for ritual and everyday use thus provide a unique occasion to discover a little understood artistic legacy, starting from the experience of those who have ably assembled these astonishing collections.
How should we approach works of African art? Where do they come from, what lives have they led, and how did they get here? What do we see when we look at them? Africa has always been a source of wonder for us, and, more recently, so have African arts, tempting us to strike out a journey, be it real or imaginary.
In order to restore or simply evoke the aesthetic, sensorial and symbolic experience of the Africans who fashioned and used those works of art, howewer, we need to squarely face the fact, so mundane and so obvious as to have become invisible, that these objects are often found in the West and not in African at all. This is the first thing we should really wonder at.
Our starting point shall not be the African villages, therefore, but the collectors' own homes, the places where many works of Africa art reside today. We shall try to understand how culture and the world in which we live orient our gaze and allow us to see some things and not others: a certain idea of Africa.