"... returning to certain central themes around which she has developed her work until today, this time Marzia Migliora shows us the possible modes of an encounter, everything that precedes the start of a relationship. The tools and the languages she uses – sound, contextual use of narration, recovery of the imagery of fables and children’s games, the photographic image used in a non-descriptive form, as the attention is focused exclusively on the detail involved – are part of a vocabulary with which the artist has constructed other stages of her discourse. The series of works born as the result of explorations of museums (in an initial phase the Italian museums containing relics of scientific, naturalistic and anthropological character), their dust, the forgotten archives, time that seems to have reached a stopping point, then the passage to an investigation of the modes of representation, also of the present (including supermarkets, the epitome of orderly presentation of today’s merchandise), the attitude of re-presenting a form of personal cataloguing of the extant through the critical confrontation with the discipline required by such a regulated procedure, as already evident in the series of videos and photos Chi c'è c'è (2000), have been temporarily suspended. In this work, in fact, Marzia Migliora has situated her images in the courtyard of the house where she spent her childhood, and the protagonists are the playthings of that time, narrated from a subjective viewpoint, like a sort of invitation to identify, to resume contact with that dimension, to still play or to play once again. Starting with this passage the artist skews the viewpoint toward her own gaze. In In punta di piedi the re-reading of what has already happened, of her own story, her own biography or that of persons very close to her is transformed into a gaze at the present. Setting down her baggage for a moment, setting off again by working on the self, getting directly involved, accentuating the hand-to-hand combat with a space that is skewed, in its turn, more toward what it can contain in the future than toward its own history. A passage that amplifies and further condenses those that came before it, giving them a possibility of further existence. In the attention fully concentrated on the present we can see a reconfirmation of the reasons behind a path in which memory, both personal and collective, plays a central role. A voyage on mobile ground in constant evolution, striving to recompose fragments of identity, aware that the difficulties, the detours and accidents are necessary passages to reinforce the path itself..."

 

Exercises of discretion with reserve by Emanuela De Cecco