The Taxidermist
(2009 Italy, directed by Maurizio Radice, color, 80 mins)
Taxidermy is the art of preserving the skin of animals. Better known as embalming, began with the Dutch explorers that brought in country their discoveries in the seventeenth century.
Today that seems to be no longer anything new to explore, that the museums of natural sciences are seen as dusty containers of useless things, that the ecological conscience cries to the scandal in front of the stuffed animals, seen as an exhibition of bad taste of corpses, that hunting is disapproven more and more, which sense still has the figure of the taxidermist? Few. Indeed the job goes disappearing.
One of the few left in Italy is Agostino Navone. He has not invented a job, he has aged in a way that made it famous, and not just in Italy. Behind the simple caption "stuffed work" of artists such as Maurizio Cattelan lurks the craftsmanship of Agostino and the workers of his laboratory.