The Terra project starts at the end of April 2022, which develops through an exhibition of works by Monica Mariniello in the cities of Volterra and Pisa, within the framework of an agreement between the University Museum System of the University of Pisa and the Museum System of Volterra. Saturday 30 April at 6.30 pm, the exhibition opens at the Pinacoteca di Volterra (piazza dei Priori 1), Tuesday 3 May at 5.30 pm, the exhibition opens at the Gipsoteca di Arte Antica and Antiquarium of the University of Pisa (piazza S. Paolo all’Orto 19, Pisa), with an intervention by Fabio Dei (Department of Civilization and Forms of Knowledge, University of Pisa). The exhibition is curated by Sandra Burchi. The Volterra and Pisa exhibitions will be open until June 30th.

As part of the project, on Tuesday 10 May at 5.00 pm, at the Gipsoteca di Arte Antica and Antiquarium of the University of Pisa (piazza S. Paolo all’Orto 19, Pisa), Sergio Cortesini, art historian of the University of Pisa, will speak with a meeting / dialogue with Monica Mariniello on the themes of the exhibition.

On display will be works from two main series, Viaggiatori and Teatrum Mundi, along with other significant works from Mariniello’s recent production.

The bodies of the Travelers – human figures in terracotta on the backs of large animals – express the strength they derive from knowing how to harmonize with the creatures they rely on. The texts of Teatrum Mundi, forged in clay with short flashes of color, refer to the plurality of stories inscribed on human faces. These series of works, the main ones present in the exhibition, account for an artistic research made of continuity, driven by urgencies that transcend the here and now to reconnect to a long time that invokes the future but which, due to the damage inflicted on nature, risks remaining confined to the past.

The reflection on materials, on color, on the act of plasma itself unites – in a broader discourse relating to the processes of art and the senses – the works on display and the statues that belong to the permanent collection of the Gipsoteca. Humans and animals on the go, the faces marked by Monica Mariniello’s long stories in fact dialogue with the classic, candid and apparently remote bodies that populate the Gipsoteca.

Monica Mariniello is a designer and sculptor who lives and works in France where she trained at the Beaux Arts in Paris. Sensitive to the themes of ecology, of the human-animal relationship, of the nature of relationships between living beings, her artistic research dialogues with the issues that worry our present. The works on display, terracotta sculptures inspired by the same material, invite you to meditate on the fragile and powerful bonds between the beings that populate the planet.

Born in Siena, raised between Florence and the Maremma, his works, in themes as well as in formal research, retain the signs and traces of the landscape in which he grew up: “When I was little, and even later, I spent long afternoons in wandering through the Tuscan countryside, often in Etruscan sites – recalls Monica Mariniello – The traces of wagon wheels inscribed in the stone of the streets of a city that has disappeared forever, the blocks of the external walls, the tombs full of silence and fresh air, the small rhombuses of white marble that run along an open-air amphitheater, all this has been engraved in my memory, as I tried with all my strength – eyes closed, crouched close to the ground – to revive the noise, the colors, the voices of a city that had known dreams of an infinite future, of the certainties of a tomorrow equal to yesterday. I come from there and my work is nourished by this “.

Source: Press Office

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