Dispersione
Dispersione is an installation consisting of 20 photographs, 5 found letters and 5 white cotton ribbons, which are the result of a private performative act held in the Maritime Alps, in a part of the Marguareis Park.
The project opens up to reflections on the relationship between loneliness and communication, on the critical balance of restlessness and stability, on the meaning of value and conservation and on the link with vulnerability, error and risk.
The 5 letters that are a part of the work are handwritten by senders unknown, dated 1916, 1944, post 1946, 1959, 1968. These writings represent a way to start a symbolic dialogue with the things that resist and whose dispersion can be determined by chance or intention. The artist has tried to decrypt the calligraphy and the sense of these forgotten letters, but they are very private mappings. Like this the artist can read the thought of an unknown, a trace that in the carelessness and disorder of the world, though has managed to survive.
The term ‘dispersion’, in addition to signifying disaggregation and scattering, indicates a possible phase in the life of a wolf; sometimes a specimen leaves its pack and goes away in order not to return. The Dispersion represents a critical phase in the life of a wolf: it is a loner, a misfit, a waste that seeks its own redemption.
In the 90s, 70 years after its disappearance, the spontaneous return of the wolf to the Maritime Alps was officially observed and recognized.
The performance act, organized in an ascent and a descent in two different days, took place on the path where Carnino Superiore leads to Punta Marguareis. During the ascent the artist read the written words aloud, adapting the reading to the rhythm of her walk and breath, where after she scattered them yet another time leaving them on the ground, under a stone. This voluntary abandonment, like a sort of vigilant oblivion exorcised the belief of preserve everything, in that part of the mind where, thanks to walking, you don’t ask questions.
The 5 small ribbons of white cotton allowed to recognize, by binding them to the nearest tree during the descent, the place where each letter was “scattered".
The 20 photographs that are part of the installation are the result of a selection of the shots taken during that walk.
“Dispersione is an intimate project in which the act of walking, to find another rhythm that can accompany the secret pulse of nature, has made perception different, correcting the blindness of the oversight we all fall victim ti everyday due to stimulation overload. Through her work, Silvia Margaria offers herself as a different yardstick by which we may capture what nature reveals and, listening in on the world, invites us to do the same using the overlapping sound of two metronomes each with a different beat: a resting heart beat and the heart beat speeded up by the effort of walking.” (Alice Zannoni, curator of the personal exhibition “La natura (non) ama nascondersi, Cubo – spazio arte, Bologna, 2021).
20 stampe Fine Art da negativi su carta cotone, b/n e colore
5 lettere trovate
5 nastri di cotone bianco
traccia sonora originale
2017
Selected projects
Silvia Margaria spent three years at the film archive of Cineteca at the National Cinema Museum in Turin, working in the field of inspection and cataloguing films.
This work experience was fundamental in forming her current artistic research: the careful way of approaching the memories and the storytelling identity from the past, and the effort of bringing you to look beyond your own ordinary bustle, they have the intermittence of the case allusions and fragments, the precariousness and fragility. Her working methodology gives importance to dialogue and participation with other visual traces taking into account the relationship between opposites understood as tensions comprising the experience of relationship with the memory of the complexity of the relationship between man and the environment.
Her research is based on a rhythm that makes slowness a method of action, to ensure that attention can be manifested in an open, measured and responsible way.
“Friction, between a nature that reveals itself and at the same time retreats into its most essential part, is the very secret of nature, namely the invisible reason of which the world is its external manifestation. Silvia Margaria’s poetic vision straddles this very point: the artist seeks the imperceptible part of nature and explores its process of appearing with an observational work based on the desire to understand the mystery of life as it runs its course. Her work, in line with what it explores, is configured in the ambiguity of opposites (scattering/concentration – hiding/revealing – searching/finding – one/many – solitude/collectivity – communication/relationship – remembrance/oblivion – resistance/change) in relation to each other rather than in their divergent reciprocation, through the processing of the transitive quality of concepts, so that the consequential motion that characterises the natural flux of things can be drawn from their dialogic link.”