For the 64th edition of the Festival dei Due Mondi, Turner prize winning British artist Tai Shani presented a site-specific sculpture installation inspired by her research into psychedelics, feminism and myth. The Neon Hieroglyph installation was sited on the Fontana di Piazza Mercato in the centre of the old town, at one end of what was once the Roman Forum. The fountain has been used by other contemporary artists, including Christo and Jean-Claude who wrapped it in fabric and rope for the 1968 edition of the Festival dei Due Mondi. Spoleto born artist, Leoncillo Leonardo, proposed an installation for the fountain’s two empty niches, although it was not realised. Shani’s installation – a portrayal of an enigmatic ghost, coiled in lucky charms and tears – is a part of her ongoing The Neon Hieroglyph project, a series of poetic considerations on the history of ergot, a fungus from which LSD is derived. In the artist’s words, The Neon Hieroglyph poses “the building of a house we will never live in, a house for our ghosts, where the gothic and the hallucinatory collide, where gothic affects and fractal dread form a mausoleum for psychedelic spectres. Also the sun! The sun is a ghost that haunts the night!” Before industrial milling, ergot sporadically took hold of grain crops across Europe, instigating mass hallucinations. The Italian island of Alicudi experienced multiple infections and, as a psychedelic catalyst, it provoked stories of ghosts and witches. In The Neon Hieroglyph, the story of ergot and the ghosts it inspires make apparitions out of apocalyptic anxieties and utopian aspirations – grief and discord circulate on the same interconnected web as ecstasy and empathy. The inner life of the feminised body lurches between technological interconnected bliss and fractal disintegration – new realities are glimpsed and briefly held.