Silvia Margaria | Inkjet print test for “Anthologìa”(Emilia Mariani, lavender)

Inkjet print test, handwritten notes, glass

2015-2019

Glossy photo paper veiling experiments (water + chlorophyll), paper, glass

Cm 30,5×45,7, 27,8×20,3 cm

Unique piece, and authenticated

The word Antologia derives from the Greek Anthologìa (ánthos ‘flower’ and légō ‘choose’) and means ‘choice of flowers’. In 2015 Silvia Margaria has chosen some flowers to bring to Monumental Cemetery and to Turin’s Socrem, to commemorate the lives of five distinguished women in Turin: Isa Bluette, Adelaide Aglietta, Emilia Mariani, Giorgina Levi, Amalia Guglielminetti. Adorning the graves with flowers is a rite bearer of profound meanings, it’s a gesture of anthropological order, obvious metaphor of the effort to survive to oblivion. The flower is the symbol of beauty, perfection and purity, but at the same time it’s the metaphor of the fragility and brevity of life.

An illustrious grave, as the meaning of the word, belongs to a character who has a wide and deserved reputation, for exceptional qualities or important actions. It deserves to be remembered in a particular way by the community. The ambivalence between illustrious and anonymous, between memory and forgetfulness, between value and waste is what constantly draws the attention and interests of the artist’s research.

The choice of the five illustrious women, deriving from a general study of the famous female graves, focusing the research on the struggle for women’s emancipation, is based on a subjective sensitivity, on personal assonances and agreements that allowed the artist to recognize and exalt them.

Each chosen flower has a specific meaning depending on the person to whom it’s related. Emilia Mariani’s name is linked to the battles for women’s empowerment and to the struggles for the improvement of the working conditions of teachers. On her tombstone you can read: She lived for youth, instructing and educating to love. She was simple, good and loving- She loved flowers and children. The devout homage of these, will be kept from your family that only now finds solace in having you with them in your beloved hometown. And flowers, flowers and more flowers will always smell good at your beloved ashes. Lavender is a long-lasting flower, with an intense and durable scent.

After the commemoration with flowers at the cemetery, there was a long period of daily documentation, through a series of slides of the withering flowers on the graves. The many slides of each flower have been waiting for a couple of years, as Margaria felt the need to expand the time and let the memory settle. In 2018 the project of Anthologìa takes shape, as a work composed by 38 photographs derived from the hundreds taken in 2015. Each picture is a superposition of two slides: a slide from the first day is superimposed with one from the last day, a slide from the second day is superimposed with one from the penultimate day, and so on until a temporal meeting on the day that is about halfway, visible in the last series overlap where two slides the same add up. The relationship between the two images, the coexistence and the interpenetration of shapes and colours, of situations and different times, it’s possible just trying to keep the communion. The final result, an overlapping sought in past times, of the memory two temporal realities that coexist becoming an evocative image. It hides the original differences under its unified expression.

What these women have left is rich, strong, deeply rooted. Knowing the past, considering the effort, respecting the lives that resist, admitting change, preserving and commemorating memory, ensure that there is an evolution, with growth and life.