Nctm Studio Legale Associato presents the works of artist Rä di Martino
On this occasion the project Authentic News of Invisible Things will be presented, whose production has been supported in the context of nctm e l’arte. The work is the subject of the homonymous exhibition recently inaugurated at Museion, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano.
Born in Rome in 1975, Rä di Martino lives immersed in a reality imbued with television, cinema and the Internet. This virtual reality, in which, for biographical reasons, she was formed, leads her to notice how today the distinction between subject and object, reality and fiction, myth and everyday life is loosening.
Her work is based on a game of mirrors, references, cross-references, on the dislocation and the inexhaustible interpretative possibility of any situation, as if life was an open palimpsest and allowed us to appropriate what persuades us most, or to reactivate situations of the past, to reconvert them by inserting our variants.
In her works, Rä Di Martino starts from real elements and then assimilates them to the fiction of the camera; in many cases she starts from stories already told and presents us with alternative versions.
The project Authentic News of Invisible Things is inspired by dummy tanks, the fake military vehicles used to deceive the enemy.
The artist refers to an archive photograph of 1918, set in the town of Lille and kept at the Imperial War Museum in London, in which a group of civilians examine a dummy tank left on the street.
Inspired by this image, the artist made two videos: in one she recreated the situation in 1918; in the other a real tank crosses the streets of Bolzano. In both cases the road becomes a stage.
A wooden sculpture replicates the soul of a fake life-size tank; other sculptures depicting dummy tanks accompany the project. The work assumes particular relevance in the year of the anniversary of the Great War, but it is also inherently related to the reflection that underlies all the work of Rä Di Martino, which is focused on the short-circuit between reality and fiction and the recycling of pre-existing visual “material”, available and susceptible to elaboration that renews its meaning.
