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Elena Mazzi

Elena Mazzi is interested in the relationship existing between humans and environment, its own changes and its moments of crisis.

Her wide range of interests includes an anthropological curiosity towards contexts, landscapes, geographies; science references, and disciplines apparently far apart such as finance and geology; the attraction for materials and craft traditions. Her projects, different from each other, sometimes long term projects, depart from a hybridization of these fields of interest from which the artist draws different concepts, methods, and different components, with the purpose to produce forms, images, narrations.

Everything starts from the explorations of the places where she is working; places that the artist tries to discover in their own peculiarities, through the eyes of the people who live in them.

Once identified the elements on which to focus, Mazzi starts making references between time, spaces and people; creating connections, she encourages exchanges of information and experience. The work that will emerge from this long process will finally be a synthesis; without renouncement to a proper precise formal value. In her different forms of representation are therefore introduced the stimulating wealth and the complexity of today’s world.

As written by Valerio Del Baglivo “When Mazzi speaks about herself, she often refers to her accidental presence in L’Aquila during the night of the earthquake in 2009. From that experience the artist has undertaken a long and constant research that led to investigate the crisis situations (intended in their different social, economical, political and geological aspects) and the consequent ability of those involved to overcome them – in other words, forms of resiliency and models of reorganization of the daily life beginning from phenomena of breakup” (Valerio Del Baglivo, Elena Mazzi, Flash Art, 6th December 2016).

The video Encounters, and the series of glass, bone and silver sculptures associated with it, are part of the extensive project entitled Becoming with and unbecoming with, of 2019-2020, which combines ecological themes and care-related issues.

As stated by the artist, such works arise from the need to rediscover a harmony between body and landscape and to restore a balance between human biorhythm and the natural course of the animal and plant kingdom. The ensemble originated from a residency in Iceland, where the artist came across a large number of cetacean skeletons. The discovery led to a confrontation that revealed a sense of vitality and kinship, and at the same time an awareness of the vulnerability that unites man and these large marine mammals in their common approach to the ecosystem and natural forces.

 

Further information
Date
  • 11 March 2020
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