Emilija Škarnulytė
Ofiolite, 2025
Drawings (salt and minerals from crushed stones) and video installation
by Sofia Baldi Pighi
Emilija Škarnulytė’s project was developed in collaboration with Organico Perduca, a micro-community in the Emilian Apennines based in Travo, in the province of Piacenza. The community comprises both long-standing residents, who have lived in the village for generations, and newcomers from nearby cities, such as Piacenza, Lodi, and Milan, who, having fallen in love with the area, chose to purchase homes there and integrate into the local cultural fabric.
Overlooking the surrounding hilly landscape visible from this small village rise the Pietra Perduca and Pietra Parcellara, two massive ophiolitic-volcanic rock formations thrust to the surface by ancient tectonic collisions. In collaboration with Professor Stefano Segadelli, a geologist in the Department of Geology, Soils and Seismology of the Emilia-Romagna Region, we learn that the ophiolitic rocks of the Apennines carried a prehistoric significance extending well beyond their geological origins. Sites such as Perduca and Parcellara have been frequented since the Neolithic period as ritual spaces and vantage points.
Drawn to these outcrops of oceanic crust, Škarnulytė envisions so-called “peak cults”, archaeological spiritual practices performed on mountain summits beginning in the Bronze Age, continuing through the Iron Age and into Roman times, and reflects on what forms their traces might assume today.
Through further interdisciplinary dialogue between the artist and archaeologist Francesco Garbasi, deputy director and co-founder of ArcheoVea, the role of Pietra Perduca emerges in connection with female fertility cults. From around 4000 BCE, mountain summits were used for ritual practices, and the current presence of the Church of Sant’Anna (dating to the Early Middle Ages) represents yet another attempt to Christianize sites previously dedicated to pagan worship.
Following the ancient association between summit and divinity, the artist focuses on the water basins carved into Pietra Perduca. Water, present year-round, reflects the night sky in its mirrored surface, suggesting the use of these stones as cosmic instruments. Interweaving geology, archaeology, and myth, Škarnulytė produces a series of drawings in primordial forms by crushing minerals together with earth, water, and salt, proposing a mountain cosmogony projected toward the sky.
These “lunar” drawings suggest an inversion of planes: from the earthly crust of ophiolitic rock upward to the heavens, evoking an ancient worldview, shared by many mountain cultures, that attributes to stone an intermediary power between earth and sky. The video accompanies the unveiling of the drawings and these forms of contemporary rock art, inviting an unexpected familiarity with the traces of an unknown culture, “the primitives of the future,” as Boccioni might have said.
Škarnulytė activates an archaeological spirituality, invents an ancestral imaginary and a lost rituality surrounding these rock masses, reinterpreting the landscape as a cosmological archive where forgotten cosmologies can re-emerge and resonate through contemporary imagination.
Note
Škarnulytė’s project originated within the exhibition The New Orchestra. From Mountain Communities to the Community of the Future, which provided each participating artist with a residency period within their assigned mountain community. Due to health reasons, the artist was unable to undertake the residency in person in Travo.
It is important to share this context with the public: artists, like all professionals, experience moments of vulnerability, and such circumstances can generate new creative directions. Unable to work directly on site, Škarnulytė reconceived the project as an investigation into the ancient archaeological communities of Travo, transforming physical distance into a space for research and imagination. Her work thus establishes a different form of proximity, in which dialogue with the landscape and its memory unfolds through geology and archaeology.
