SUN GOTHS! MIRACULOUS MONSTERS! “UTOPIAN” DREAMERS!

It’s been some time, but I write to you with exciting news from a bat’s eye view. My newest hand painted groundwork Gateway to Infinity (An Anti-monument) is complete and awaiting your blessings and footsteps in downtown Boston. I’ve been working on this multi-faceted project for over a year with amazing curator Audrey Lopez of the Greenway Conservancy as well as a handful of genius collaborators you’ll read about below.

If you’re hoping to visit the piece, search for “Greenway Carousel” or “Boston Harbor Islands Welcome Center”on a map. My flaming portal sits just between them on the high-traffic walkway across from the Long Wharf Hotel and New England Aquarium. It may be covered in ice cream or ketchup when you visit, but we’re putting together a plan to clean it monthly - hopefully you’ll catch it in a glowing state 😇

GATEWAY TO INFINITY (AN ANTI-MONUMENT)

…stretching 45 ft in diameter is a painted ground work that explores site-specific histories and collective rebirth. The piece features a turning tri-limbed motif referencing symbols such as the Trinacria, Triskeles, and Triskelion that organize around a triple spiral. Varying iterations of the Holy Trinity, which the artist considers a “Gateway to Infinity,” reflect ancient, dynamic structures that expand dualist binaries. Located on Massachusett and Pawtucket land, between so-called “Christopher Columbus Park” and “Faneuil Hall,” this artwork seeks to call upon the receptive properties of an Anti-monument, positioned to pull energy toward the earth for composting. The work invites audiences to reflect upon and contend with the sites’ violent legacies and the choices made to freeze and commemorate them via conventional stone monuments. Molteni’s energetic installation aims to alchemize petrified trauma by centering moving, living bodies upon a communal platform, rather than atop towering pedestals.  

PROCESS

For nearly a month we worked in scorching sun and sudden daily thunderstorms, likely the most erratic weather I’ve ever had to contend with. I documented much of the process, which called for tight and tricky spiral math as well as loose free-hand drawing and stencil mapping. The mosaic motifs, that guide the flow of walkers in each of 3 spirals, were particularly laborious but something I’d been wanting to try since my travels in Italy.

Hugest thanks to my assistants on the piece- all of whom are friends and excellent working artists in their own right: Ali Reid, Nicole Hogarty and Laura Ganci (who also performed as our 3rd Gorgon!) as well as Alexis Weinrich and Diya Ghosh who popped in when we needed all brushes on deck. We painted the entire piece 2-3 times over with no larger than a 3” brush. I felt SO lucky to have the support that I did on this very demanding piece.

Videos of the process of: 📐PLOTTING 🎨PAINTING 🔮TRANSFORMATION

Read below about how the work was activated on the Summer Solstice ☀️❤️‍🔥🐍

TRISKELES & THE MONSTER’S TOOLS: A SOLSTICE INVOCATION OF MEDUSA CONSCIOUSNESS

On the Summer Solstice, Molteni and non-binary Italian American collaborators Vin Caponigro, Laura Campagna, Ash Capachione welcome you to this public ritual upon the newly finished painted artwork, a spiraling labyrinth representing non-dual, cyclical expansion. Three Gorgons (Molteni, Caponigro, and Ganci), united by a lunar Priestess (Campagna), journey to the center, an Anti-monument, to invoke the spirit of Medusa Consciousness and the emerging awareness that recent reflections on her myth have reawakened. 

Guests were invited to participate via printed paper talismans, a collective movement ritual, and personal family heirlooms (physical and conceptualized). Together we call upon the beaming sun, salty ocean, and three conjunction planetary bodies – the Moon, Venus, and Mars – to aid in a regenerative alchemical process. Beginning on this longest day, our inherited artifacts transform via frameworks of “The Master’s Tools” (an influential concept of Audre Lorde) into the “Monster’s Tools” (offered by thinkers such as Ece Canli). By the fire of the Solstice sun, we forge new tools and paths for the future from the melted refuse of the Masters’ instrumentation.

Centering reclaimed narratives of Monsterized, Othered beings, we wish to restore connections of the mind and heart, land and sea. Our aim is to welcome a fully embodied Medusa into the space left vacant by the heartless, beheaded Boston Columbus. 

As a queer artists who incorporate Monsters into our work, we take particular interest in how queer communities embrace Monster Theory and lore to express pride, power, and alienation. When we consider the Monster and their tools, we recognize hybrid systems that pull together primal and futuristic desires. Just as the labyrinthine triple spiral moves clockwise and counterclockwise, we must look backwards and forwards to reinvent tools for new awarenesses. By the Solstice’s fiery rays, we melt down the tools of our ancestors and reshape them for future states of heart-centered action.

HEIRLOOM SUBMISSIONS!

Many of you participated in our Call for Heirlooms as the work was being painted. Artifacts and heirlooms play a role in the imagery of “Gateway to Infinity” and its Solstice activation. Such inherited objects are small, yet equally monumental tools for memorialization and magic. They serve as anchors for personal and collective memory and responsibility, reflecting narrative patterns passed on through culture and family. The heirlooms submitted through our virtual call, as well as carried to the site in hand, mind, or heart will undergo a change.

We managed to depict your heirloom submissions in two dynamic ways accessible during our Solstice ritual. Click the image below to find out how I incorporated the imagery directly into the painted work:

PRINTED MATTER/ EXPANDED MEDIA

…And read more about the research and concepts behind the artwork + ritual in two publications: a double-sided, light-sensitive risograph printed poster (pictured below) as well as a project zine featuring contextual essays by project collaborators.

Both published items were designed by Caponigro and printed by Snake Hair. They will be physically available as takeaways at the site of the mural in the coming months, but you can read through the zine DRAFT PDF here.

Stay tuned as the performance will expand via 1) video artwork by Capachione, 2) expanded/printed final publication (including a foreword by Medusa researcher Liz Andres), and 3) a guided meditation (accessible by this QR code).

THE NEXT ADVENTURE?

GREAT AWAKENINGS + Radical Road Trip Seeks Heaven On Earth!

Myself and Melissa Nierman (of Now Age) will host an intimate caravan of inspiring mystic peers on a road-trip-style pilgrimage. From July 22-30 Great Awakenings will travel through potent sites of historic and contemporary Spiritualist, Shaker and 19th century abolitionist communities in Massachusetts and New York State. 

Beginning in “Witch City” (Salem, MA) and ending in “The Town That Talks to the Dead” (Lily Dale, NY) for the annual 2-day symposium *The Science of Things Spiritual, this roving retreat - in the year of the Chariot - will touch down in spaces integral to spiritual and communal paradigm shifts referred to as “Great Awakenings” in (so-called) American history.

With a focus on parts of the Second + Third Great Awakenings (1820s-1850s), we seek to reconnect with historic visionary movements by immersion in the land and structures that hosted them - often labeled “Utopian”. Through critical dialogue, psychic exploration, and creative engagement, we’ll co-create refreshed notions of Heaven on Earth (Shaker communal ideal). Facilitating reading circles, movement workshops, ceremonial hikes, intuitive development, collective dreaming, guided tours, our adventurous pursuits will lead up to Molteni’s symposium lecture and conclude with an outdoor screening of the Sacred Sheets film inspired by Shaker Gift drawings of the same name.

☀️ Pilgrimage sign-ups have closed, but there are still a few spots left in the Lily Dale only portion of the trip. Reach out to myself or Melissa/ Now Age to inquire about staying with us at the Aurora House during the conference and/or participating in our scheduled events from July 27-30 🌻

👆Can’t make it out but want to learn more about the Shakers, Spiritualists, Intentional Communities, etc? Check out

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With love under the stars,

❤️‍🔥 Maria