The art piece Marocchino Essiccante is about the interconnectivity of all elements of Earth, including the long-term effects of human acts on nature and climate. It is part of a series of small-sized art pieces related to drying the Po River in Northern Italy.
Title: Marocchino Essiccante
Medium: African iron tree wood, raw cocoa seeds, glass, rainwater, red seal wax.
Size. 12”X18”X1/2”
The art piece Marocchino Essiccante is about the interconnectivity of all elements of Earth, including the long-term effects of human acts on nature and climate. In 2023, the artist created a series of small-sized art pieces related to the drying of the Po River in Northern Italy. The choice of such a piece is based on the fact that it presents a vision to observe and analyze elements like color, material, textures, and composition, as well as a global meaning outside the visual form. The viewer can experience the pleasure of seeing the warm, earthy colors and soft velvet texture and teleport to the origin of the objects composed in the artwork. Still, the complete aesthetic pleasure will come after understanding the story behind the piece.
A thick piece of wood in rectangular form, approximately the size of a human face, with wood grain unusually compressed and lacking distance between the growth rings. The texture of the wood piece suggests a tropical wood kind, and the color speaks about a significantly tall tree. The artwork label mentions that the artist used a piece of wood from an African iron tree. About twenty cocoa seeds appear from the ironwood in a symmetrical pyramidal composition. The top center of the work is taken by a half-inch glass bubble filled with rainwater according to the medium description.
The overall look of the artwork is primitive and primal. It connects the viewer to a sense of African wooden sculpture in a postmodern mix of other materials. The style of the piece also blends contemporary Natural or Environmental Art. The artist's proposition involves natural materials, emphasizing essential qualities and textures. The piece has formal characteristics similar to those of the work of Andy Goldsworthy, Nils Udo, Agnes Dene, and Robert Smithson, among many others. However, this work differs because natural materials and organic forms are used for a conceptual message. Next to the esthetic pleasure of the materials stays the text with the deciphered code of each object of the composition. The pure, formal reading of Dodavia's work could mislead. The meaning of the iron tree wood, seeds, glass, and rainwater are the codes that explain why the Po River is drying up. The function of which visual element is presented inside the artwork's textual part. Each object has a role and is a character of the piece. The artist invented the name Marocchino Essiccante in Italian as a coffee drink he created with cacao and crystals of Mediterranean salt that is supposed to lead the person who drinks it to the concept of the drying Po River.
In the text with the work, the viewer learns that Italians and tourists consume about 80 thousand tonnes of cocoa annually. It means 400 million trees in the African rainforest were cut down to plant cocoa plantations. Each rainforest tree transpirate (bringing backwater into the atmosphere) around 6000 gallons. The artist concludes that nearly 700 million m3 of water is not sent back to the atmosphere over African and European continents with rain every year. Dodavia compared it to 250 thousand Olympic pools filled with water. According to the artist, this is one of the reasons why rivers like Po in Europe dry and disappear.
Marocchino Essiccante points out how pleasure drinks in the developed world that are not even essential for the body's nutrition participate in the imbalance of the environment and climate. The artist states that the Italian rivers disappear because of the destroyed water precipitation cycle. Deforestation through cocoa production is imbalancing water and energy distribution in the Italian soil, plants, and air. This produces irregular precipitations, fast evaporation, overheating, and the greenhouse effect. The main point of Neri Dodavia's artwork is that rivers like Po dry because trees in West, Central, and East Africa are cut and replaced with cocoa plantations. The text on the work says, "Every cup of Marocchino dries out another meter of the Po River."