Digital video animation, 2020 

The second chapter of Magica results from a unique and innovative design that combines traditional mixed techniques such as oil and graphite on paper with a skilful manipulation of the graphic tablet and modern editing and composing procedures.
The artist generates an expression based on the dialogue between old and new and the video installation is conceived as a hymn to the magic and mystery of life where the incessant metamorphosis of forms and contents alternates and bursts. Inspired by the disorder of Neapolitan life, the artist unveils the tangible order of a people that constantly move by alternating chapters of celebration and oblivion.
The past and the present are forged in the meanders of a urban perimeter where light consistently plays with shadow across a labyrinth of Greek-Roman vestiges, Baroque palaces and Christian cathedrals. 
Thus, the hypnotic rhythm of the video sequence – punctuated to the beat of the original music composed by Claudio del Proposto – develops according to a perpetual topographic and human crossing: in-out, above-below, feminine-masculine, past-present.
The world is revealed through the artist’s eye that merges with that of the city, it is an ancient and powerful symbol of civilizations worldwide, an emblem of knowledge, clairvoyance and benevolence.
Using a primary chromatism, reminiscent of the Pop combinations experimented by Andy Wharol, Franz Cerami creates a personal stylized version of the  cosmogony of symbols that,  between mythology and history, continue to exert a profound influence on the Neapolitans’ contemporary life.
A graphic and ludic synthesis of the Capuzzella (the day of the deads), refers on the one hand to the idea of ​​Memento Mori, a classical concept that encourages to celebrate life by representing the transience of existence, and, on the other hand, expresses the unique and ancestral bond that connects the Neapolitans with the souls of their deceased. 
A tradition that reoccurs year after year at the Fontanelle cemetery with a festival that unlocks a temporal interval between life and death to allow the living to communicate with the afterlife.
The Parthenope Siren and Virgil’s Egg are the icons epitomizing the etiological myth of the city’s birth and death. Finally, the two heads facing each other, a reinterpretation of Janus the ancient bifacial divinity as a key to understanding the capillary paradoxes of a city that cannot be experienced through reason or a didactic knowledge of history for its profound truth lies in the oxymoronic harmony of a series of complex semi-truths composing its human mosaic. These two figures symbolically share the sacredness of the meal, with a spaghetti that connects their mouths … and their souls.