Installations and site-specific artworks
Igea – 2020
Installation for Secret XII – Reminiscences, Spazio46, Palazzo Ducale (GE), from 23 January to 9 February 2020. Project Secret XII conceived and curated by Virginia Monteverde, Project Reminiscences curated by Gloria Veronica Lavagnini.
Igea, name of the Greek goddess of hygiene, is an installation that places its reflection on the contrast between internal and external, psychological disorder and the need for rigor and control over the external form. Many elements of analysis: skin, perfume, fashion, plastic surgery… The heart of the discussion is the devastating effect that an internally accumulated disturbance can have on the external world.
Hurters – 2014
Published by the City of Art in Biella, Rebirth-day by Michelangelo Pistoletto. Exposed at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.
The hurters is the first approach to the Floods Series. Black wall. 7 faces of mud on paper. 7 cans on a flooded table of which 6 full that show on their caps the photograph of the most affected area in the single episode: 1953, 1970, 1992, 2011 and the two in 2014. Inside them, in white, the names of the dozens of victims who remained imprisoned inside the mud. The table shows the dates to which the cans refer. Finally an empty jar asks for redemption with its green cap of hope, a projection of a future cured of its wounds that can boast of not being filled with names or mud. Even the light comes from the right, illuminating the future and leaving the past in the dark. The title The hurters is a reminder of the original name of the Bisagno river, the choice of the plural underlines how each river can also become a “wound bringer”.
Fèmme (Infibulation, Menstruation, Vagina, Birth, Illness), cm. 20×15 each, 2018. Exhibited for the Manifestation against the practice of infibulation, BCCFestival, Cuneo.
For social reasons, the woman is often forced to hide natural aspects of her being. There are positive and welcome elements of it such as birth and therefore life, but at the same time there are taboo aspects such as disease / PUS / secretions, the simple Menstruation or the word Vagina itself which in still places today cause closing. Even worse, practices such as infibulation in central African regions force many girls to undergo and bring with them the memory of a brutal cultural practice that in many cases leads to death by bleeding. This small series of five vaginas is not meant to be a mere denunciation but rather an affirmation of what women are without shame or fear of judgment, free to be able to speak about themselves openly.
Social miniatures – 2016. Here in site-specific installation for the Great Halls of Villa Sormani – Mariano Comense, 2018.
Among the social problems faced in the I Am Here Series we find that of Non-Respect and Non-Cure: these are the concepts of Social Mignon and Reflection Tables. They are notes, stimuli on the contemporary: from pharmaceutical waste, to the psychosis of our society based on work, from the impossibility of creating a family or maintaining what we have, to smog, from waste, to the exploitation of nature, from lobbies, to actions carried out for economic, religious, political interests and so on … finally, reflections on what ultimately belongs to all of us (rich, poor and of any ethnic or social state), death as mere men. So the question: what is all this for?
Society. Economy. Screws hanging from wires. Struggling to be able to live and overcome death. Small delicate reflections, aesthetically pleasing, calm and precious with soft colors but with a deep and sharp meaning: isn’t our society based on perfect appearances and imperceptible deceptions? The last aesthetic aspect to be emphasized in these works is the transparent support obtained here through the passepartout in grid which, as observed in other works of this series, tells of that camouflage, of that Pirandellian mask, of the change-face or worse of the change-thought man in front of different places, situations and people. Finally, as well as all the cuttings of materials that give life to these small collages, the frames also take the form of wood destined for waste for a consistency that is both conceptual and executive.
An ever present dichotomy, against social classes through the word. Installation commissioned by HOME a cultural Project of Casa Gramsci located in Turin, in 2017.
The installation is the result of an in-depth study of the political leader of the early 1900s. Gramsci, a Sardinian boy who arrived in Turin without money, meets the snow and his first Nordic winter. In one of the letters to his father he asks for money to buy a coat. I imagined owning his coat with his documents and writings in his pocket with original calligraphy. In the background the building perpendicular to the Library of Turin, where he studied every day. The building represents the social classes through the fabrics that the various social classes could afford. On the street level the shutters with the shops, on the first floor the nobles with large decorated windows, light silks because they underlined the possibility of washing the fabrics if they were stained, and pearls. Going up we find the wealthy families with fabrics and velvets of refined color. Lastly, attics with narrow windows, raw and dirty cotton cloth for the poorest. A snowy sky… so I tell of historical episodes really happened, so, I imagine Gramsci walking through the squares of Turin, young and poor, with his coat hardly conquered, with his writings on loose sheets slipped absently into his pocket, with his struggle against the social classes through the power of the word and even more with the hidden word, unspoken, erased as in these texts. It is from the unsaid that the stimulus evolves even more. A young man with a revolutionary soul and rich in dreams.
Missing, 2019. here placed in two exposures. In glass cases for Frera, Tradate (VA) and wallinstalleted inside the deconsecrated Church of Nerviano (MI).
Mixed technique: combustion, collage, poppies, wax, earth and sacred-symbolic materials on sheet metal. Each cm. 10×10 – tot. cm. 350×100. It belongs to the series of social memory and addresses one of the current principles such as IM-MIGRATION. This work must be read from left to right and wants to tell about a journey, the escape from a currently inhospitable land, war, bombings, fire and an ash sky as represented in the first three fragments. It is an escape that takes place across the sea. In the first part, these fragments of water hold back to themselves victims represented by red blooming poppies. In mythology and in religions, the poppy is a flower symbol of death, sacrifice, blood and eternal sleep. In my research, the souls of the victims are represented by fragile flowers to underline their temporary nature, in fact destined to leave only a trace in the work and then disappear, like the man in history who leaves “traces” of his passage and then vanishes . These flowers are often topped with candle wax, a memory’s element of the light that illuminate the cemeteries and therefore as a commemoration of loved ones. The commemorative moment, of stall, of quiet, of memory, in this installation we find it in the central triangle. Here the red is abandoned and the dominant colors become blue and white. White as a symbol of light, life, reliance on something else, be it a religious creed, fate or another Faith in which to pray / hope, in the western world, more commonly identified in the Christian cross, the highest point of the installation. In this triangle, a relationship between two deep spaces: sea and sky where the stars are reflected in a continuous reference and where man lost in that “ocean” is forced to abandon himself and believe in a better future. Continuing the journey, the earth appears in the last stretch. Other poppies appear, this time poppies that have managed to dry out, age, those who have managed to reach the mainland, rich in their roots, their stories, experiences, cultures. An olive leaf: biblical symbol of life and the presence of the earth. In the last fragment, this land hosts a third visual form of this flower: the seeds, ready to create new life, ready to continue, or better to start again, another journey. Finally, an empty jar suggests a summary of this multiple narrative. If seeds are grafted into potentially deadly elements such as water, earth and air, life is generated. How is it my way of working, inside always present reflections, words, questions, to solicit a reader ‘s own thought: never an imposition of thought by the artist but an openness to dialogue, to thought in a society in which we stop to develop our reflections, in comparison with what is simply foreign, unknown or different. Each object is sacred-symbolic in that it is self-telling. This journey can be more widely read as the journey of each of us. Leave one “land” to reach another. Go through difficulties, voids, moments of despair. Trust in the hope of a new, better life. Reach the goal and start again. Trips that can be the individual life of a human being, the realization of a project or a goal, a transfer, a change of job, life or country and so on…
