Associazione

Images of men, women and children packed on makeshift boats
risking death at the mercy of the waters of the Mediterranean can not
help but change the consciousness and sensibility of all of us.
Processing through art this nothing less than momentous tragedy,
can be meaningful. As an artist, I feel a deep need and ethical
responsibility to do so.
Nevertheless, with this site-specific work, I have attempted to
represent not solely a physical journey - that of those who are forced
to risk their lives in hope of a different destiny, but also an interior
journey, an interior journey of transformation which every man and
woman may have to undertake in order to overcome anything that
does not allow us to be completely human.
A transformation only possible through the encounter with and
acceptance of that which is different, unknown and so to be feared -
the threat that the stranger represents in our collective unconscious,
which implies the recognition in others of our shared humanity
without which a truly just world is not possible
Remains of what was once a shelter, fragments of everyday objects
caught in ripped nets, adrift after a shipwreck, create a sort of
theatrical setting which convey feelings of displacement and
laceration. From the darkness of a lifeless, desert -like landscape, the viewer is channeled along a path which finally leads to the encounter with those who, having braved death, can now tell us with words and expressions of their present lives.

Franca Marini, January 2018