Shifting Landscape – Marta Ciolkowska | Mara Di Giammatteo

curated by Maria Chiara Wang
June 3 | 23 2023
Opening June 3 2023, 7 p.m.

FourteenArtellaro                                                                                                                                                                     Piazza Figoli 14, Tellaro di Lerici (SP)
DEBACLE Review
curated by Gino D’Ugo

Panta rei, everything flows in an eternal becoming: what happens if we apply the Heraclitean proposition to the concept of landscape? Shifting Landscape – a two-person exhibition by Marta Ciolkowska and Mara Di Giammatteo curated by Maria Chiara Wang for the Fourteen Artellaro exhibition offers a possible answer to that question through visual translation of the causes and consequences of the rapid environmental changes that characterize the 21st century. Indeed, the works in the exhibition serve as a magnifying glass on certain contemporary vulnerabilities related to the ecological sphere.

Fast Life by Marta Ciolkowska, made in an additional site-specific wall version, makes visible the path taken by goods sold in the global market (from production to distribution) with the aim of raising public awareness of the environmental impact caused by their transportation. Consumption, on the other hand, focuses on the abnormal amount of waste generated by the consumer society and carelessly dispersed by it into the environment.

With Mara Di Giammatteo‘s artworks, the focus shifts to the ecosystem: the installation Futuri Estinti is an inventory of names of endangered fish embroidered by hand on looms composed of fragments of antique hemp cloth. Lui, Lei (He, She), a pair of handloom-woven towels featuring the embroidered names of “races” of butterflies that are becoming extinct, is another opportunity for the artist to return to the same theme, emphasizing its extension to more species.

It is thus that in Shifting Landscape, change turns out to be related not only to the landscape to which the works allude, but also concerns the perspective from which it is observed. Indeed, thanks to its communicative power, its direct and empathetic language, art can be a catalyst and agent of change in favor of a more sustainable approach to the environment.