Maria Vittoria Cavazzana @ LAVAPIU
LAVAPIU 2021/2022Curated by Celeste
08.03 – 08.04.22
LAVAPIU, Via Nicola Castagna 9
Teramo
The images I am presenting for LAVAPIU were constructed with personal pictures provided by two inhabitants of Teramo, Fabio and Silvia. I asked them to share with me images which were representative of their memories and somehow tied to their city and territory, giving them complete freedom on the subjects and on the dates of the images. As a result I collected a huge number of pictures spanning from the 40’s until today. My work consisted in comparing, cutting and glueing back up all those memories, until the outlines between each story started to blur. I let the images blend and used my sensibility to create new figures based on suggestions borrowed from the images’ contents such us: interiors, landscapes faces and bodies. My intention is to create a shared panorama of emotions in which we could all see our relatives, our friends, our childhood and distant memories which we only know from family’s pictures books. The images resulting from this process are unstable, moved by nostalgia and tenderness in an undefined moment in time; opening up to unrealised possibilities, parallel universes and future life.
Maria Vittoria Cavazzana
Maria Vittoria Cavazzana (b. 1993) lives and works in Venice. She holds a degree in Multimedia Arts (IUAV, Venice) and studied at Chelsea College of Arts in London.
Selected exhibitions include: Palazzo Contarini del Zaffo, Venice (2017); 101st Young Artists Collective Exhibition (Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice, 2017); and London Grads Now (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2020).
Her practice is grounded in theoretical and formal research that centers ambiguity, transformation, and metamorphosis as key elements in an identity-seeking journey realized through contact with the Other. This exploration manifests through esoteric rituals and immersion in both collective and personal unconscious realms and memories.
Working with documented performances, textile manipulations, photographic works, and object creation, Cavazzana engages with ritual and magic while navigating the thin line connecting erotic impulses and death drives – channeling these forces into tangible yet often ephemeral, mutable, and elusive forms. Integral to her practice is an exploration of the feminine as: erotic magic, primal force, and sociopolitical/philosophical subject.
Maria Vittoria Cavazzana. Exhibition views from LAVAPIU, Teramo 2022 © Celeste.
