Great Mothers cycle

2014

Permanent work exhibited at MAAM – Museo dell’Altro e dell’Altrove di Metropoliz, Rome

300 × 175 cm

Diptych.

Dyed and padded canvas tapestries, stuffed with jute and sewn with cords and thread. Ready-made. Shells, small toys and objects collected at MAAM.

This work, created for MAAM, is ideally inspired by the women living within the housing occupation of Metropoliz, in the former Fiorucci salami factory on Via Prenestina.

The shells, small toys, buttons, stones, fabrics and ribbons sewn onto the breast-shaped forms become brief testimonies of their stories, evoking their different origins and memories, and ideally narrating, through their interwoven fabric, a community formed by individuals, yet perceived from the outside as an organic whole.

Like the panels of a storyteller, their voices can be heard, their stories sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted. The two tapestries bring together, into a symbolic and unified “body”, the 333 breast-shaped forms made of canvas, each distinctly marked by its own individuality.

The canvas is a single skin that holds together the many sculptural forms, evoking small portraits of young women, at times playful, at times dramatic.

The archaic character of the formal representation, its primitivism, refers to the great archetypes of generation, fertility, nourishment and sexuality, while powerfully containing within itself the playful, Dionysian aspect.

In my research, through sculptures in plaster and canvas, I represent primal eros, the generative power of the earth and the human body.

Mine is a biomorphic abstraction that transforms canvas into an archaic skin, torn, stitched back together and scarred.