Secreto
2017
Site specific mixed media installation
photographs, objects and ceramic, variable dimensions, performance.
Installation view, church of San Carlo and Sant’Agata, Reggio Emilia, Italy
Entitled Secreto, meaning both secretion and secret, Vanzo presents a site-specific installation inside the deconsacrated church of San Carlo and Sant’Agata in Reggio Emilia, during the Festival Fotografia Europea – Off in 2017.
The vestiges of the small Baroque temple become part of the artistic project. Vanzo creates a dialogue between the memory of the location and the memory of a rediscovered photographic archive. “The church, the physical place of prayer, is par excellence a place that holds secrets, most of our secrets. It is the place where it is allowed – or not at all – to lay bare the soul”.
These words of the artist echo her work, aimed at bringing out the hidden soul of things and people. Vanzo disseminates the church with a large group of vernacular photographs, an actual archive of an Italian family that lived a century ago.
She intersects the pictures with small ceramic inserts that comment the portraits, to create an alternative narrative where the new images bring out hidden secrets.
Family pictures are juxtaposed to ceramic inserts modelled by the artist. These emerge from holy water stoups, from cracks in the walls, from slits in the windows, a metaphor for the hidden history of the place – ancient and unknown, that literally spills out of the walls.
By creating unprecedented conceptual juxtapositions between past and present, aesthetic overlaps between photography and ceramic sculpture, Marcella Vanzo creates a space for the reinvention of photographic practice in art.
Marinella Paderni
