ENIGMA – FEDERICA MARANGONI
curated by Viana Conti and Christine Enrile

FOLLOW US ON OUR SOCIAL CHANNELS TO DISCOVER FEDERICA MARANGONI’S PIONERISTIC PATH OF ART
INSTAGRAM: cecontemporary
FACEBOOK: CEcontemporaryMilano

 

in compliance with the COVID19 regulations, reservations are recommended on: www.cecontemporary.com

Federica Marangoni, fifty years after her debut in the world of art, succinctly entitles the solo exhibition designed for the c|e contemporary gallery in Milan, ENIGMA.
The mythical term derives from the Greek αἴνιγμα which, in turn, leads back to the verb αἰνίσσομαι, which means to speak in an obscure way by resorting to insoluble, sibylline questions, facing the threshold of a high-risk response. The answer, for the viewer, is inherent in the artist’s work itself, in its devices of opacity or transparency, of darkness or light, of consumption in the wreck or of restitution in memory, in words, in silence. This is a strong project of the ENIGMA exhibition, which is constructively confronted with the fateful Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” – which the 58th Venice Biennale, by the English curator Ralph Rugoff, titled. Particularly significant reference today, in advanced times of pandemic, in which that title sounds like a prophetic premonition. That false anathema, however, considers interesting the times when the recession and the crisis cannot fail to awaken potential reactive and creative energies. ENIGMA, a site-specific exhibition, historically follows the mega-installation The leading Thread / Il fil Condatore at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Ca ‘Pesaro, curated by Gabriella Belli – which accompanied, in 2015, the Exhibition International Art Exhibition All the World’s Future of the 56th Venice Biennale – and anticipates, in the New Pavilion of the ex Conterie Veneziane Museum, again curated by Gabriella Belli, the exhibition event Federica Marangoni – Looking to the future – Anthological exhibition and 50 years with Murano, as well as the next major exhibition at the Marciana National Library in Venice, directed by Stefano Campagnolo, Memory: the Light of Time, curated by Roberta Semeraro and Viana Conti. The exhibition, dynamically and optically articulated on the triangulation of concepts such as motion-emotion-motivation, inevitably moves from the focal center of Mirroring Memory / Memoria specchiante, the work that leads back to the dwelling (das Heim) in which one lives, the place of Disturbing Freudian in which familiarity and strangeness do not cease to alternate in a disoriented subject, at a subliminal level, between discoveries and bewilderments. In front of a house, oversized, in glossy black perspex, with a typical sloping roof, the spectator is invited to rest his gaze on the keyhole, as in a Wunderkammer. The scenario that opens up to him is the so-called Droste Effect, so dear to Escher, that is, a recursive perspective escape of blue luminous traces, with an altered proportion, in potentially infinite succession: disturbing the overwritten in red (das) Unheimliche / Il Perturbante in the German language of Sigmund Freud, author of the book of the same name in 1919. The Motion component is recurrent in Federica Marangoni’s work, both live and in the video projection or in the handwriting in progress on the wall. Further reference to the space-time dimension is documented by his historical performances in attendance, such as The Box of Life at the Centrovideoarte in Ferrara in 1979, The Interrogation at the MoMA in New York in 1980, Straphangers c / o Inroads Multimedia Art Center in New York, from 1981. Between material artifact and immaterial flow, the figures of paradox and oxymoron appear in Federica Marangoni’s work in assuming the book object as the light of memory and at the same time the indifference of oblivion. In glass and neon, the book is a luminous source of knowledge, in oxidized iron it is the residual expression of an experience imbued, however, with memories. It is memory, in fact that globalized and fragile returns in blue neon, as a basic motivation, to reactivate pages of a life consumed and reactivated by living. Slipping between Venice and New York, a story that of Federica Marangoni consigned to the gaze, to the imagination, to belonging to a territory that identifies itself in its deterritorialization from the level of the horizon to that of the mind, to find itself in the disrupted album of a resplendent, kaleidoscopic archive of memories.

 

text: Viana Conti