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On the occasion of the "European Night of Museums", on May 14, 2022, the Gipsoteca di Arte Antica will be open in the evening.

The Terra project starts at the end of April 2022. It 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 Pisa and the Museum System of Volterra.

On Saturday, April 30, at 6:30 p.m., the exhibition will be inaugurated at the Sotterranei della Pinacoteca di Volterra (Piazza dei Priori 1, Volterra), while on Tuesday, May 3, at 5:30 p.m., the exhibition in Pisa will be inaugurated at the Gipsoteca di Arte Antica e Antiquarium of the University of Pisa (Piazza S. Paolo all'Orto 20, Pisa). Prof. Fabio Dei of the Department of Civilization and Forms of Knowledge will participate in the inauguration.

The exhibition in the two Tuscan locations is curated by Sandra Burchi, currently a scholarship holder at the Department of Civilization and Forms of Knowledge, and the exhibitions in Volterra and Pisa will be open until June 30.

As part of the project, on Tuesday, May 10 at 5:00 p.m., Sergio Cortesini, professor of History of Modern Art at the Department of Civilization and Forms of Knowledge, will speak at the Gipsoteca in a meeting/dialogue with Monica Mariniello on the themes of the exhibition.

Terra - Pisa
The exhibition will feature works from two main series, Viaggiatori and Teatrum Mundi, along with other significant works from Monica Mariniello's recent production.

The bodies of Viaggiatori - human figures in terracotta on the backs of large animals - express the strength they derive from their ability to tune in with the creatures they rely on. The heads of Teatrum Mundi, forged in clay with brief splashes of color, refer to the plurality of stories inscribed on human faces. These series of works, the main ones in the exhibition, account for an artistic research made of continuity, moved by urgencies that transcend the here and now to reconnect to a long time that invokes the future but that, because of the damage inflicted on nature, risks remaining confined to the past.

The reflection on materials, on color, on the act of shaping itself unites, in a broader discourse related to the processes of art and the senses, the works on display and the statues that belong to the permanent collection of the Gipsoteca. The human beings and animals on the move, the faces marked by Monica Mariniello's long histories dialogue with the classical bodies, candid and apparently remote, that populate the Gipsoteca.

Monica Mariniello
Monica Mariniello is a designer and sculptor who lives and works in France where she studied at the Beaux Arts in Paris. Sensitive to the themes of ecology, of the relationship between man and animal, of the nature of the relationships between living beings, her artistic research dialogues with the themes that preoccupy our present. The works in the exhibition, sculptures in terracotta that arise from the inspiration of the same material, invite a meditation on the fragile and powerful links between the beings that populate the planet.

Born in Siena, raised between Florence and the Maremma, her works, in their themes as in their formal research, preserve the signs and traces of the landscape in which she grew up:

"When I was little, and also later, I spent long afternoons wandering around the Tuscan countryside, often in Etruscan sites. The traces of the cart wheels inscribed in the stone of the streets of a city that has disappeared forever, the blocks of the outer walls, the tombs full of silence and fresh air, the small rhombuses of white marble running along an open-air amphitheater, all this was carved in my memory, while I tried with all my strength - eyes closed, crouching close to the ground - to revive the noise, the colors, the voices of a city that had known the dreams of an infinite future, the certainties of a tomorrow equal to yesterday. I come from there and my work feeds on this" (Monica Mariniello).

Information and contacts
info.gipsoteca@unipi.it

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