Fragile Citizens
Fragile Citizens is a photographic series that consists of shots of reproductions of classical sculptures illuminated by an ultraviolet light usually used in archaeology and restoration to make visible the imperfections or the presence of non-original materials.
The plaster copies in the gallery, in their evident fragility, seem apparently ‘perfect’ under ultraviolet light, according to its conventional use.
The term perfection has as synonyms, among many completeness and exemplarity, inimitable. The contrast between the nature of these figures, which lies in their reproduction in duplicates, and the concept of perfection remains suspended around what is meant by value: value is perfection? or can we understand fragility, a constituted element of the present, as a virtue, a value, which resolves itself in change? The change occurs when, for some reason, we find ourselves in a riskier condition, in which we are weaker, more fragile.
If we operate exclusively according to the logic realization, of completeness ,of excellence and usefulness, of ‘perfection’, we will lose access to all those ways of making sense that hold against unpredictability, instability and vulnerability, according to which we react and create relationships: ”(…) The unpredictable nature of time is frightening, but thinking through precariousness also highlights that indeterminacy makes life possible” (from The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing).
Thanks to Gipsoteca Mondazzi.
6 direct Uv led prints on 5mm float glass, colour.
84×56 cm., 72×48 cm., 63×42 cm.
2022
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.”