Sulla soglia dell’imago, between relational art and digital communication
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Sulla soglia dell’imago (2021) is the work selected for the first exhibition of AIRE, a series of artistic residencies promoted by Perimetro Fluido. In the context of Zona Blu, a Cultural and Artistic Association, the residential project aims to create new forms of collectivity and dialogue between different artists.
«If the inventors of cultural performance “put the mirror before nature”, they do so with “magic mirrors” that make ugly or beautiful events or relationships that cannot be recognized as such in the continuous flow of daily life in which we are enrolled».
For the artist Marta Mariano (Milan, 1996), art has the task of reflecting contemporary times. Her practice aims to subvert the current media age of communication. An age where the relationship with the other is characterized by the overload of digital media that the single person lives in a unidirectional way, without being able to respond. So, the artistic gesture has the role of reclaiming its revolutionary character in order to create and modify the connections with the two-dimensional image.
The site-specific installation Sulla soglia dell’imago places a “magic mirror” in front of the visual language used by the frenetic society, to highlight what Jung indicates as “unconscious representation”. Moreover, the gallery space is divided into two levels, both spatial and temporal; on the ground floor the viewer is invited to describe through words what he sees.
Identities, dialogues and bodily movements are projected simultaneously in the white cube on the first floor, making concrete the boundary between individual mental processes and the physical evidence of collectivity.
As in the reading of a book, the artist forces the viewer to read and create a mental image of the event; the use of a Kinect sensor, an instrument that returns the movements of the person with a rarefied image, stimulates the faculty of imagination.
The artwork Sulla soglia dell’imago wants, therefore, to create a gym of individual cognitive psychology, which pushes the individual to overcome their limits.
In the social era, the attention paid to the image is decreasing. In fact the audience needs to feel at the center of the artwork, author of its own mental change. This concept is embodied in a relational installation, which invites the viewer to become an actor and to enter the work psycho-physically. Thus he becomes part of a continuous sensory and communicative network.
As in the virtual world, the work of art also needs multidirectional information; the different individualities that interact with the installation produce an accumulation of messages able to generate a transformation both in thinking and in thinking ourselves within the world.
In order to create a community consciousness, we need to return to a playful language and communication. A language capable of subverting the standardized images that the normed word indicates to us.