“If your tooth hurts, your tongue keeps going there. You are always aware of a wound “, reminds me Martina Zanin, artist born in 1994 in San Daniele del Friuli, who, quoting the director Ingmar Bergman, tells the creative and psychological process with which she came to realize her latest project I made them run away.
The story sinks into the past of the artist, who grew up with her mother and her various partners, who never became a stable and reference male figure. As an adult Zanin became aware of the anger and resentment that her family environment had settled inside her and decided to deal with these emotions using artistic practice as a cathartic remedy.
Zanin likes to use different media: photographs, texts, videos, sounds. Here he creates an intertwining, which unravels between past and present, between the old photos of the mother torn to remove a finished love and those taken between 2017 and 2019 by the daughter, which try to recreate moods, mental and visual associations. . The pages of the mother’s diary are inserted in the dialogue between old and new images, writings full of desire and melancholy designed for the man she never had.
I made them run away became a book, published in October by Skinnerboox. Leafing through it strikes the sequence of archival and symbolic images, born from a creative process nourished by research, imagination and instinct. Zanin does not work by following too many rules, he immerses himself in a photo that already exists and reinvents it as movement or he looks for a common thread that is not necessarily guided by logic. Talking about the making of the shots, he takes as an example the relationship between two photos in the book: “The little girl touching an Adam’s apple is a scene full of tension that vents in the image of a wave breaking on a staircase . I perceive the sensation, the emotions, I hear the sounds, I distinguish the hardness of the Adam’s apple and the sound of the waves beating against the rock. It is not just observing, it is penetrating into a parallel world and that is what I try to convey “.
After the book, the project is now also on display at the Spazio Labò in Bologna, until 14 January, with an installation curated by Laura De Marco. It would seem a finished job, but for Zanin it is not completely so because the memories are always in our heads, they change, they are transformed and if we decide not to forget, they become our companions for life.
(Giovanna D’Ascenzi)
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