29 28 that us, in the West, are afraid of colours, whereas in Africa there is total freedom. These suggestions led to both the video and the digital processing contaminated by painting techniques to which I added resin. Burkina Faso also returned in the works Women InColors, which I exhibited in 2019 at the Domus Art Gallery in Athens. In this new series I was inspired by African models arriving at a new representation of the memories of that journey, this time using only resin and acrylic colours on the canvas. What led you to choose resin, which has become the material to which you have entrusted your expressive style? First there was only painting, then photography on Plexiglas reworked and contaminated with painting. The technique evolved with the addition of canvas painted with the same image under and over the Plexiglas; then painting and resin passed over it and, finally, resin and other materials worked together. I was attracted by the reflected light of Plexiglas and in a way, resin has the same technical characteristics as Plexiglas. In fact, plexiglass is a polymethylmethacrylate, hence a hard resin, while industrial resin is a synthetic polymeric material. For Extra–urbane, I decided to use resin on the reprocessed photograph. I liked the idea of layering resin on top of photographic processing because it recalled the concept of suspension of memory. In that series, I superimposed images of my trip to Africa with images of Rome, my city. Later I experimented with the use of resin on canvases painted with layers of oil colours, as in the works in the two-person exhibition Sei gradi. Un istante (2009), also at Gallery 196, but I soon realised that controlling this material was very difficult. With these works, in 2010, I was invited by the Italian Cultural Institute of Damascus for a solo exhibition at the Aburemmaneh Arab Cultural Centre and to participate in the Art Symposium at the Ma’rat AlNoaman Archaeological Museum in Idlib. Over time I continued to experiment, looking for the resin that best suited my needs: the intuition came when I realised that I could “talk” with the element I was using, supporting it. Letting the resin react on the oil, rather than imposing a forced use on it, could even become a strength. Freeing the stroke, as well as the resin, was a further step that I came to thanks also to a period in which I meditated assiduously. The meditative practice helped me to remain centred and to bring out a part of me through the stroke itself. It is no coincidence that in 2018, the first exhibition after this period of experimentation, I called it Iosepha, which was what my Latin teacher called me in high school. Giuseppina in Latin is Iosepha. An exhibition in which I presented only female figures. Not that I hadn't worked on the theme of the feminine before, but this particular project was the story of me in a very delicate and also transfigured way. The woman I represented was almost unreachable. A woman who shows herself by hiding. I took up this theme again in a subsequent project, where the subjects are a woman with a little girl: two figures talking to each other. It is still a very introspective work, but at that point I felt I had freed myself completely. I no longer needed to narrate; I could finally “enter” the works I dreamed of making. This introspective path, as you said, is reflected in the much freer use of resin... In the Iosepha project, I used white canvases with resin that I let interact with the colour. It was very difficult to make because, working on instinct, I didn't always manage to avoid soiling the canvases, which had to remain immaculate. Transparency was also important because of its ambivalent symbolic meaning. In relation to individuals, it shows the existence of “transparent” people in a positive but also negative sense. People who can be so transparent that they almost don’t exist, or they can be everywhere. It is also the story of my mother, and of many other women, who despite having great inner strength did not have that ability to shout, to make herself heard and to fulfil herself in life, as well as a mother and wife. I remember a beautiful film Memoirs of a Geisha in which the main character says: “water digs its way through stone, and when it is trapped it creates a new opening”. Resin is as liquid as water and is originally transparent. There is a link, of course, between water, resin and the female figure. These women, whom I call “liquid”, represent both fragility and sweetness and sensuality and strength. Speaking of strength, in Guido Levi’s book Una storia piena di paure, di anie e di avvenimenti quasi gialli 1942–1946 (2021), for which we collaborated, you dealt with the story of the escape of a Jewish child and his family to Switzerland to save themselves from Nazi-fascist persecution... Despite the dramatic nature of that terrible period, the pages of the diary I chose for my illustrations always have a poetic look. Guido Levi was a four years old boy living a peaceful life in Genoa. But one day in 1942 he woke up in his warm and cosy bed to the roar of bombs. War had broken out! The diary begins with the allied bombs dropped on the port of Genoa and continues with her and her Jewish family's escape from Nazifascist persecution from city to city until they
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