Silvia Margaria | Inkjet print test for “Anthologìa”(Amalia Guglielminetti, nettle)

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.

The poet and journalist Amalia Guglielminetti was famous, economically independent, cultured, loved by the most consolidated critics of the time; she represented all that the feminists of her time claimed as inalienable women’s rights. She was restless and passionate, prone to break the rules of the bourgeois respectability that relegated women in the dark corners of the literary salons of the time. She said of herself: Anyone who knows me know that I’m grumpy as a nettle and that my temerity isn’t made that words. Her lifestyle and her literary activity gave impulse to the emancipation effort in action in her time.

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.