Ghost Track (Lozio)
Ghost Track: the content of a music album, whose existence is not listed on the cover or within the publication's information.
Ghost Track (Lozio) is the work of the artistic residence falía* Air 2023 in Val Camonica.
The duality between existence and non-existence is the theme of the work, an essential aspect when considering contemporary society: everything is devoted to the explicit demonstration of one's presence in the world, leaving no room for the hidden and unmanifested, which are, however, crucial for giving meaning to our existence. The artwork is thus a collection of objects and visions attempting to restore value to the unseen and seemingly insignificant, because they are hidden.
The reflection on these themes starts from the concept of ghost track and the dimension of surprise, wonder, perplexity and confusion that arises when one discovers that the listening album continues beyond its technical end. In this way, an intimate and almost secret communication is emphasized between the musicians and their patient listeners. This hidden track can only be discovered by those who do not experience listening in a fast and distracted manner, but who have the audacity to wait through those interminable - and sometimes almost unbearable - seconds of silence between the declared tracks and the hidden one.
Just as the ghost track is a musical composition that is seemingly not present on paper, in a broader sense, Lozio is a village that does not exist. While the hamlets of Villa, Sucinva, Laveno and Sommaprada have tangible locations and realities, Lozzio is merely a name without concrete tangibility. It can therefore be considered a true ghost track, like the hidden fifth track - yet so evident - of the surrounding valley.
This duality between the manifest and the hidden is also well represented in the mountainous environment characterizing Lozio's landscape. The mountain embodies the essence of the hidden and the act of seeing without being seen. The woods, in particular, with their inhabitants at the edge of the wild and the monstrous, symbolized everything that could not be fully known and were thus exorcised through legends and folk stories. This gave rise to the wild man, a legendary figure widespread in the Alps and Apennines, which in Valle Camonica's tales corresponds to the character of the barbaluf. This figure is always a liminal presence between humanity and untamed animality. It is a giant man who, despite its considerable size, remains unseen, covered in hair, with long hair and beard, dressed in leaves, tree bark, moss or animal skins, carrying a staff used for defense, procuring food and gaining grater stability during its movements.
5 Fine Art photo prints on Hahnemuehle Photo Rag Booh&Album 200, resin;
5 sticks, twine
2024
Saint Peter and Paul Church (Villa, Lozio);
Wild man. Engraving by Giovannino De Grassi (14th century), kept at the Angelo Mai Civic Library, Bergamo;
detail of stamping on a photographic print.
Drawing on this distinctive element, Margaria creates the 'staff of staffs' of the gigantic wild man of Lozio, composed of the sum of five staffs, accompanied by five panoramic photographic prints. They are taken with infrared black-and-white film (Rollei Infrared), capable of capturing beyond the visible light spectrum.
It is precisely on this thin boundary between absence and presence, precariousness and certainty, that our gaze should linger, as in Margaria's shots, suspended between the visible and the invisible. It is in this undefined and ephemeral space that we can give new value to what is hidden, recognizing it as an identity element to construct a critical vision of the present, where everything inevitably needs to be manifest, clear and placed in a precise logical and mental orde.
This symbolic attempt to show us what is usually invisible is also realized in the inscription made with Venetian turpentine on the photographs. The word "LOZIO" must be sought with patience and attention, as it hides within the photographed landscape, much like a ghost track. This becomes a sort of invitation to slowness and contemplation, to fully grasp a reality made of presence and absence that combine and coexist, suspended and elusive. However, in trying to outline them, they demand a different measure of attention, leading to a new conception and understanding of what is not see.
(Alice Vangelisti, curator)
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.”