Dear Elisabetta,

I have so many things I need to tell you about this rather long period during which we haven’t seen each other.

As usual, several activities overlap in my daily life, and every day I tell myself: “One thing less to do, but the next day I end up having one extra thing to do. Fortunately, all my interests coincide and evolve organically one from the other, and merge in my artistic activity, which in turn open up to new forms of art and new media.

When we met, I was already working at the Multimedia Laboratory of the Department of Antiquity and Late Antiquity Sciences of the University of Bari. The laboratory has continued to grow through various activities: collaborating with archaeologists, historians, and philologists, all matters regarding graphic design, iconography of books, photography, and now video editing as well, which I use to document their work in the field.

I have now been working for several years with the Fine Arts Academy of Bari, where I periodically teach graphic IT. I hope this collaboration will continue, because in spite of various kinds of problems you run into in the fields of training and culture, the Academy is a place where you can always find interesting people to share ideas and projects with.

In the meantime, I got closer to the world of video clips, and started playing an instrument again, after I quit, as you may remember, when I got into the Fine Arts Academy. As you know, I don’t like doing things halfway; I wanted to learn languages in order to travel abroad, so I graduated in Languages and Foreign Literature. Right now I am into music, and have decided to take classes at the Music Academy, specializing in percussions, and am also taking other courses as well which allow me to compose digital music, and insert in my videos directly.

My passion for Blues took me to the shores of the Mississippi river where I assembled an enormous amount of material for a project I am working on which will be rather complex in its use of multimedia, but will be similar in content to my Travel Book, the one I had started working on when we first met.

As you know, my travel notes are for me an important starting point; many images and a few written notes vaguely suggesting how to rebuild the puzzle of places and situations that memory doesn’t always put together in an organic, logical order.

I choose images by following an associative mechanism, wandering about naturally in my memories. This way of “navigating” through and putting together images, destroys the special and temporal being of places, giving birth to “transversal” groups of images, as opposed to a travel diary or news story’s habitual timeline. So that when the image appears isolated, decontextualized and distant from any form of narrative context, each image becomes separated from the objective occurrence, and gives space to the development of imagination, as a way to interpret the image.

That is why all my projects remain open-ended and linked to one another, and my work forms a nest, a cloth with different threads and a pattern left open, where the work becomes a path beneath which you can read the map of the mind, with its archetypes, its knots, its ramifications, its roads: the labyrinth-like  zone where the images go in a direction, and then come back to a starting point, melting and disappearing in the infinite tricky game of the search of memory.

My approach to art is directly linked to human beings in their psychophysical and multidimensional complexity. The moment of artistic creation is a meditated act linked to the possibility of experimenting and then expressing several interior universes and states of mind.

I probably approach work in the same way I practice yoga and martial arts, which are different fields involving action, different forms to proceed to the same observation, concentrating on a simple gesture.

And as you can see, a few of my choices of study have proven to be useful in the long term, such as the Doctorate on Theory of Language and Sign Sciences, which followed my Bachelor Degree in Languages, the DEA in History of Religions, which I took in Paris.

As I told you in the beginning, I am interested in many different fields, that is why days seem too short for me and time is never enough, and I should start to “empty the cup” as Zen masters say. But how could I resist to your proposal to pick up the threads?

See you at the opening, hugs

Maria

Bari, January 8, 2014