Sunday Jack Akpan’s business card bears the following words: “Undertakes Construction of Images, Statues, Tombstones of all kinds, Pottery Products, Marble Tombstones, Decoration of House Furniture, Drawing and General Arts.” This first exhibition in Italy by the sixty-one-year-old Nigerian artist consisted of a group of eighteen statues (one of which had previously been exhibited at the Venice Biennale) portraying the upper echelons of traditional tribal society: chieftains, matriarchs, sorcerers, shamans, and dignitaries. But they are joined by a soldier in camouflage overalls with a submachine

When people leave the places where they live and work, it sometimes seems that those urban and industrial landscapes, no longer “disturbed” by human presence, finally begin to lead a secret life, their true life, invisible to the human eye. This is an ancient sensation—a sort of animism but it may also be found in full-blown Romanticism (one can’t help but think, for example, of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker) , which in our own time has been anything but sated. Indeed one could say that today, when one can speak, for instance, of the “soul of a new machine,” this form of animism is in its prime.