Hunting Hunters

Hitnes tells a story drawn from the animal world. In Riparbella he has depicted an everyday scene whose protagonists are some of the little birds that live in the woods around the town. Here the relationship between people and nature is still lived in a spontaneous, down-to-earth way, and hunting remains a widespread practice on which the local cooking is founded: the most typical dish is Riparbella-style wild boar.

The work grew out of the stories people tell, and in particular those of “Riccardone”, one of the owners of the building and a well-known hunter in the town. Hence the play on words in the title, and the scene itself.

Out of the wall, as in a dream or a fairy tale, emerges a robin — the traditional symbol of kindness and sacrifice — at the centre of the composition, perched on a boulder. A few magpies, symbols of deceit and cunning, fly all over the building and surround him, watching him from the trees.

Normally it is the magpies that raid robins’ nests and feed on their eggs, but here the scene is turned upside down. A glittering ring is hidden under the boulder, and the magpies drawn towards the trap seem to have become the prey. The ending is left to the viewer: is the robin saving the magpies by defusing the hunter’s snare, or is he the one who set the mechanism up to take his revenge? Or perhaps magpies and robin, having learned man’s tricks and knowing our vices, have joined forces and begun to hunt the hunter?

In Hitnes’s work man is deliberately absent: here too the hunter is nowhere to be seen, yet he is the pivot of the whole scene. The mural was created thanks to the revenue from the tourist tax and a contribution from Società Parco Eolico Riparbella.