III acts performance, installation and digital film (115 min, single channel, color, sound)



awards
Art For Environment Prize 2018 - chaired by Lucy Orta, University of the Arts London


realised with the support of
Fattoria Vittadini, Milano Musei Civici (IT),
ViaFarini Documentation Centre for Visual Art (IT)
Associazione Culturale dello Scompiglio (IT)
Centre For Sustainable Fashion, University of Arts London (UK)
MARCA Museo delle Arti (IT)

credits
conception, realisation and set / Maria Luigia Gioffre
performers / Maria Luigia Gioffre (Act I), Giuseppe Fabris (Act II), Sara Saccotelli (Act II), Ylenya G. Cammisa (Act III)
sound recording/ Maria Luigia Gioffre
technicians (sound) / Giuseppe Tripodi

 shows 
THE SEEDER @ Lo Scompiglio (September, 2018, Vorno, IT)
PREGHIERA (first study) @Fattoria Vittadini (May 2019, Milan, IT)

Purgatory of Spring (solo exhibition) @ Marca Museo delle Arti (February 2020, Catanzaro, IT) - closed due to Covid-19

The work does explore the aesthetics of a speculative post-apocalyptic landscape in which the scenario of the collapse of mankind and the scenario of prehistory coincide each other for their figurative aspects of a wasteland and an unbreathable environment.

Act I, THE SEEDER, 2018
A room is filled up with soil and dried braches. A performer picks up the dried branches and plants them into the soil, then uprootes them. The action is repeated all along the space and into all vases.

Act II, EDEN, 2018

exctract video 
https://vimeo.com/394231480

Two performers pick up dried branches from a tree and they try to rebuild an alternative garden of Eden in a domestic space of a bulding in decay, never completed or already destroyed.

Act III, PREGHIERA, 2019

exctract video
https://vimeo.com/341069756

An imaginary last human on earth inhabits a state of unbalancing while holding an horn and attempting to play sound through it.
The condition of falling, given by her feet standing on a very tiny surface, makes the performer uncomfortable and unable to play the horn. The performance consists of this constant and unreacheable desire of, which comes as a liturgy of a desiring living body.

“An installation path within Marca Museo delle Arti that becomes a reflection upon urgencies of contemporary time. The soil - a plowed with dried branches and empy vases - comes to be the point of conjunction between the primaeval 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 divided in three acts. Each of them narrates, through a circular time, about a blurred beginning and an end. 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 as immersive installation: 25.000 ofsoil 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.”
extract from exhibition catalog
curated by Simona Caramia and Gaetano Centrone.