“ The apocalypse image is vivid, evoked not in biblical terms but rather as a possible state of destruction, shown throughout the presence of soil: abused, abandoned, but stratified with meaning. Hence the choice of an infertile ploughed field, a waste land on which are placed dry branches and empty flowerpots. It is the setting for a primordial exploration expressed through the rituality of gestures—those of the artist’s performances—like washing an atlas or ploughing the soil—and is revealed through The Memory of a Garden—that is, in the experience of the body and in the memory of child sounds, almost at the origins of everyone’s existence, like the cry of a newborn and a music of a carillon.”
(Simona Caramia)
“Maria Luigia Gioffrè belongs to those groups of artists-thinkers who question themselves continually about the meaning and directions of the things in the world but do not advocate any ideology. Instead, Maria lives her actions as poetic opposition to the present. She began her artistic career with photography and turned inevitably to performance art. She blends the body into performance practices, concentrating on the action itself, which she feels as an installation that breathes, as a painting that comes to life, as a fragment of theatre-art.”
(Gaetano Centrone)
“An installation path within Marca Museo delle Arti that becomes a reflection upon urgencies of contemporary time. The infertile soil - a plowed with dried branches and empy vases - comes to be the point of conjunction between the primaeval Eden and the apocalyptic landscape of a future not so far away. A poiesis of the archaeology of both past and the future. Classical music - Wiegenlied op. 49 n° 4 Guten Abend, gute Nachtof Brahms- and the voice of a newborn crying overlap one another till vanishing in the last room of the space, where it is installed a punched roll-paper of carillon with signs of asemantic writing and the soothing sound of a carillon. In the first room, it is shown a photographic series extracted from a trilogy of a performative work entitled Purgatory of Spring, realised during years 2018 and 2019, and subdivided in three acts: Seminatrice, Eden and Preghiera. Each of them narrates throughout a circular time, about a beginning and an end which lines are blurred, about men and women whose actions appear suspended. Along the three acts, there can be perceived a visual gradatio which from an archetypical solitude of the primal woman leads to the multiplicity; from a timeless scenario to a post-industrial one.
The exhibition continues then with “Il Giardino” as immersive installation: 25.000 lt oftopsoil in a space of 150 cube-meters embedded with sounds that are at the core of most ofour lifes, such as a newborn crying, and a carillon music.”
(Fondazione Rocco Guglielmo, January 2020)
