Hearing the word Atlantis can conjure up images that immediately take us on an imaginary journey. In this case, it is not so much Atlantis as a geographical location, idealised as the cradle of civilisation – although the influence of the various civilisations of mankind on each other, the transmission and formation of layers of meaning, also plays an important role in the exhibition – but rather an inner, beyond-appearance core to which we seek to relate.
In the Neoplatonist interpretation, the soul forms individual objects in matter according to the ideas of the Divine Reason, and Aristotle also saw Form as the union of Soul and Matter. The sculptures in the exhibition are also formed as imprints of our innermost soul, our ancestral images, and act as a bridge between bygone cultures and the declining civilisation of our present:
“At the origin of every true civilization there is a divine fact (all great civilizations are based on the myth that they were created by gods): no human or natural factor can reverse it…Everywhere there is the hybris of individualism, chaos, anarchy, humanism, degeneration in all domains…From pre-Antiquity we can trace this “evolution”. We shall see: from the distant myth of the divine kingdom, we descend caste by caste until we arrive at the faceless forms of modern civilization, where the demonism of the mere demon and the demonism of the world of the masses is rapidly and terrifyingly revived in mechanized structures.”