Ci stavamo seduti sopra
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On May 9, 1978, after 55 days of kidnapping, the lifeless body of Aldo Moro was found. The police investigation ended abruptly with an image that the whole of Europe still remembers: the corpse of the Christian Democrat leader in a suit, theatrically contorted, in the trunk of a burgundy Renault 4 abandoned in the central Via Caetani in Rome.

But, while everyone was looking at the form, no one noticed the background: behind that dramatic mise-en-scène, mysterious glued posters showed a silhouette of what looked like a logo in the shape of a goat, an image that for years generated curiosity in artist Alán Carrasco. Finally, during his stay at the Spanish Academy in Rome, he found the clues he needed to piece the whole story together.

The goat on the poster was a reference to a sculpture from the exhibition “Roma dalle origini alla Repubblica” [Rome, from the origins to the Republic], at the former Antiquarium Comunale, which was to be inaugurated on April 21, during the kidnapping of the former Prime Minister. Once the museum was dismantled, its collections passed to the Musei Capitolini, depositing the original sculpture at the Centrale Montemartini.

The small bronze goat was found in a sacellum outside the Porta Viminalis and today we know that it would have been used as a votive offering around the sixth to fifth century BC for the goddess Nenia. According to some authors, such as Marco Terenzio Varrone, Nenia Dea would be a personification of the protective power of the funeral lament. It would be a minor funerary deity that, in a polar position next to Janus, protected the life cycle of people. In the same line, Arnobio de Sicca explained that those who were about to die were under the care of Nenia.

Using the original photographs taken by the forensic police of the most important political assassination in Italy’s recent history, and in order to question the official narratives through aesthetic maneuvers, Carrasco develops a particular layout that proposes a possible symbolic narrative about an event that is still full of unknowns.