nctm e l’arte presents a talk with Margherita Moscardini, recipient of the scholarship nctm e l’arte: Artists-in-Residence
Thanks to the scholarship, at the end of 2014 Moscardini will stay in Seoul for three months as a guest of MMCA, the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Seoul, which will allow her to undertake research to conceive the project Once they came, and they cut and stolen the tops of our mountains.
The project, currently being developed, arises from the strong impression made on the artist by the Seoul skyline, which resembles the continuous profile of a mountain relief. The whole built-up area lies inside the green belt of the mountains, deeply present in the everyday life and culture of the whole social fabric, as well as in the local pictorial tradition.
The work also focuses on apartment buildings and the way they are purchased and distributed through model houses. In such phenomenon the artist recognises a system that has deeply conditioned not only the urban landscape of Seoul, but the hopes, behaviours and economic growth of an entire country.
The project is part of the investigations of the artist, who has always been interested in the relationships between urban, social and natural transformation processes belonging to specific geographies.
Moscardini often focuses her attention upon abandoned areas or those to be demolished whose rubble disposal is paradigmatic of the local complexities. Her work favours long-term processes and projects, considering the context as a vehicle: the architecture, landscape (in terms of the geo-morphological characteristics of an area) on which the building was designed and how urban planning affects the behaviour of local communities.
The context is what suggests the topic of specific research, work material and methods to the artist which she then develops through large-scale interventions, designs, texts, small-scale models and video-documents. In many cases, it is the context that suggests specific areas of investigation, materials and methods of work, which the artist then develops through large-scale interventions, drawings, texts, scale models and video-documents.