My work Keramikos, earth and fire/ 108 names of the Goddess, is a tribute to Lithuanian-born American archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, whose merit is to have brought to light the mythical time of a raffined egalitarian culture in which the female body of the Goddess and sacred Nature were one and the same. She has been able to introduce and support with in-depth studies a broad and complex view of what she defines as the "Civilization of Ancient Europe." I do not intend with my work to take up the styles of the archaic world; the men and women of that time did so sublimely. Everyone brings back in what they do much of themselves, and ceramics is for me the world of forms, and in that urgency of making, integrated with other skills, she is the ideal material and language for this project. A world, that of ceramics, whose fascination, however, has specificities and very specific rules with very long waiting times. Accepting the moments when there is not total control over the work teaches one to "accept the imponderability" of matter: of earth, colors, fire and their interaction in what is the powerful dimension of "making." Empathically, life is energy, travail, aspiration and fulfillment. Life is activity. The form that has always been credited with the protective function of containing and guarding is an archaic symbol of the feminine: a vase, a small vessel. A crease on the circumference interrupts the perfect shape of the circle. Deforming is an unconventional action; it means changing the original appearance of the form by changing the original appearance of the story. The vessel, moreover, circumscribes in What-is-Hollow the reason for containing What-is-Essential, "the primary reason for everything," an important aspect of the sacred for archaic civilizations.
In the last period of her life Marija studied Sanskrit and the number 108 is The sacred number of India connected to the archaic conception of cyclic time that survives in those civilizations where it is important to be in harmony with the Cosmos. It is a feminine lunar magic number and refers to the four phases of the moon multiplied by the number of twenty-seven which are the days when the moon returns, regardless of its phases, close to the same star. The idea of dividing the moon's path among the stars into twenty-seven parts, using a significant position of the moon in these twenty-seven parts, served the ancients to deduce the respective position of the sun. Thus fixing seasonal phenomena and the development of the human life cycle. India had a history similar to that of the Ancient European Civilization. The Aria, warriors from the steppes of the north, empowered by advanced technology, the two-wheeled chariot and the domestication of the horse, subverted the existing culture, but the cult of the Goddess lingered underground in many parts of India. The power of Shakti, personification of the energy of the feminine and Prakriti, Naturating nature, still persists in the filosofic visions of Hindu thought. The messages contained in the forms can be traced to cognitive messages, as processes of knowledge aimed at producing and passing on knowledge; phenomenal messages, acquired through sensory experience; and aesthetic messages in which beauty is that ethical dimension in which the collective recognizes itself. Understood in the raffinity of the archaic forms of Ancient Europe a system of signs that Marija Gimbutas calls "scripts," signs, complex graphemes that she considers anticipatory of writing. By communicating messages and a real language imprinted on the earliest archaic artifacts, ceramics is confirmed as the essential medium for the most ancient form of language that does not only fulfill the function of "significating something," but of "significating for someone," and in this relationship there is the "place" where human community is created. The reading of her books, which did not happen by chance, is the result of research on the traces of the Goddess that began in an ancient city in Asia Minor, Ephesus. The greatness of Artemis, contrasted by the Ephesians with Paul's preaching, can be read in the Acts of the Apostles; her beauty is still shocking today. In 2016 I began this work of homage to this extraordinary woman. I did not have 2021, one hundred years since her birth, as my goal; I am amazed, I for one, at the coincidence of this date at the achievement of the magical number 108. It pleases me to think that it is the Goddess who guides us, always.

For Marija Gimbutas / "Keramikos, earth and fire" / 108 names of the Goddess
by ELEONORA PANICONI

PERSONAL EXHIBITION at National Archaeological Museum The Etruscans of the frontier of Pontecagnano Faiano (Salerno)