Il Circo delle Lumache
When most people think about snails, they imagine either a garden nuisance or a culinary delicacy. Il Circo delle Lumache proposes a third perspective: that snails are fascinating beings with whom we have co-existed and co-evolved for centuries, and that a few minutes in their company might reveal something about time, sensation, and attention that the rest of our environment rarely offers.
The installation is a miniature circus — part spectacle, part natural history museum, part petting zoo — built to human scale but oriented toward snail experience. It invites visitors to slow down and enter snail time: a sensory world structured by touch, slowness, and a relationship to gravity quite different from our own.
The protagonists
Il Circo delle Lumache was created as a homage to Ambrogio and Cornelius, my snail companions during the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, and to the many snails that followed. As soon as the Circus was announced, neighborhood residents began bringing me the snails they'd removed from their gardens, assembling quite a cast of characters who took staffing shifts at the circus, each with their own personality.
The trapeze rope, merry-go-round, and Ferris wheel provided plenty of climbing structures to play on, while silicone plants alongside real grass and living greenery maintained a beautiful and, for the stars, edible environment. An accompanying interactive program on a touchscreen introduced the individual snail protagonists in more detail and let visitors attempt to navigate a virtual snail across the trapeze, complete with sound effects.
Snail Petting Zoo
Visitors meet the snail protagonists up close in the petting zoo, learning the do's and don'ts of handling snails and joining in at feeding time. Playing with snails and other small creatures was once common among children, but during the circus's run I learned that very few young people these days have held a live snail before!
Snail Mail
Throughout the run of the circus, visitors could write to the snail protagonists from anywhere in the world to have their letter read aloud to an individual snail or to the whole troupe. The bricks-and-mortar post office onsite furnished snail-sized envelopes and paper. The service borrows its name from the English phrase "snail mail," used to refer to conventional post.
