HEART OF STONE - PRACTICE GALLERY, PHILLY - SOLO 2025

Heart of Stone builds upon an ongoing project called Counting to Infinity (Contando all’Infinito) and a body of work called Beautiful Seven (Settebello). Both gather around a set of fifty found stones and hand drawings which cradle their forms. Colored fingers reflect Molteni’s childhood habit of counting Hail Marys on their hands, like decades of Rosary prayer beads. Sibilline Books of Cumae speak of Cibele, a large black meteorite stolen from Phrygia by Romans when they learned of the great mountain mother’s rock form. Biblical excerpts coax the human heart away from the earth and toward a purified “flesh”. Meanwhile, the animistic world, by which shells, lagoons, mountains, comets and stars are alive and pulsing, observes the heart of stone. When counting beads and beats, bodies reunite with the rhythms of heaven and earth. Through this lens Molteni exercises what they call Celestial Antiphony, a call-and-response relationship with the divine.

This work began serendipitously on the Great Solar Eclipse of 2017, when Molteni found their first Italian playing card on the floor of the Adriatic Sea. The work connects Molteni’s original deck of playing + divination cards and the popular Italian card game Scopa (meaning “broom”) to their avid interest in the Pleiades star cluster, global Seven Sisters mythologies, and a solo pilgrimage to seven Marian miracle sites sacred to the mountainous region of Campania.

The term Settebello literally means “beautiful seven”, naming the luckiest card in the game of Scopa. Stelle Scopa adapts language used by ancient astronomers to describe comets as “broom stars” or “sweeping stars”. The imagery in Molteni’s deck incorporates their hand drawings, Italian stone iconography, and the fifty “beads” from a terrestrial Rosary. Stelle Scopa departs slightly from tradition to include five suits, with the planets Mercury, Mars and Venus in place of typical Court cards. A set of eleven asteroids serve as the deck’s “Major Arcana”. Sixty-one total cards equals the full number of beads on a traditional Rosary. Shuffling, cutting, and handling the deck evokes sacred stone collecting as bead and body-based prayer. Card table altar arrangements, hand rolled rose beads, video performance set to sounds of the Moon and Venus, seven portal-like grottos, cast hands modeled after Madonna statuary, and handcrafted brooms further explore themes of queerness and cosmic cycles. 

This exhibition is generously supported by a grant from the Artist’s Resource Trust