Curial dicastery hosts art exhibit on migration
June 12, 2025
The Dicastery for Culture and Education has announced an exhibition in its new contemporary art space, Conciliazione 5.
The exhibition, “No Man Is an Island,” opened on June 11 and features The Bell Tolls Upon the Waves, a 2024 video installation by Albanian artist Adrian Paci.
“The work is inspired by a real event: in 1566 in Termoli, during a Turkish attack, looters tried to steal the Bell of Saint Catherine, used to warn sailors of danger—a failed attempt, as the bell fell into the sea, sinking the boat on which it was being transported,” according to the dicastery, which added in a statement:
Recalling this event, Paci designed a bell placed on a floating platform in the sea off Termoli, as if the historic one had resurfaced. The intense video shows the bell reacting, with its tolls, to the movement of the waves—sometimes gentle, sometimes violent.
The Bell Tolls Upon the Waves is a work with strong symbolic value, referring to loss and to the Mediterranean as a mass grave holding the remains of tens of thousands of migrants. For them, the swelling of the sea marked the boundary between life and death. The bell’s tolling across the waves is a funeral lament, a warning, and a reminder: every lost life concerns us all.
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