Ilaria Margutti
Projects: narrazioni impossibili
The series “Narrazioni Impossibili” started with the intention of travelling the dimension of dreams through the vision of a sleeping figure and the obsessive repetition of the object like a container of the mind.
The dream is a re-evocation of that intimate and safe place that comes from infancy, sleep like a have and a nest, an escape route and a detachment.
Dreams are mental experiences that belong to sleep, but are also borderless laboratories of thought, containers of disclosed memories and revealed images, the journey that leads to the edges of our past existence…
A ferocious and invading existence that overbearingly enters into the charmed worlds of memories almost as if it does not want to let go, unconsciously tearing apart and scrutinising all the images that confuse themselves between waking, sleep and remembrance. The body as the sole proof of our existence, that appropriates all that comes from memories capturing the images like precious breaths of life and existence.
Ilaria Margutti
Impossible Narrations
The Sleeping Nymph by Antonio Canova dates from 1820 and is an extraordinary marble statue on display in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Nymph is lies on rumpled drapery and rests on her fore arm brushing her cheek with her left hand. The sleeping nymph sleeps a deep and regenerating sleep, intimate and relaxed. The Nymph sleeps and the Hermaphrodite sleeps, Endymion sleeps and the Faun sleeps. Venus and Cupid sleep. A calm and abandoned sleep, the eternal sleep of the shepherd of sleep, the magnetic sleep of the goddess and the deep sleep of the baby.
Sleep, a biological clock, alternating between waking and sleeping, REM phases and non REM phases. Because, in all of us, there exists a moment where everything combines, the sleeper and the dreamer, sleeping and dreaming. “We can never rest. This is our trial and our fortune” and it happens that dreams and memories blend together and become confused.
There are women, young women, suspended in milky dimensions that inspire intense and faraway dreams. Curled up and crouched, like Klimt’s forbidden drawings, they dream as they sleep and then recount them. Caught in a heedless abandon of sleep they seem tepid and creased, undressed and full of torpor, unarmed and disarming.
Ilaria Margutti has called them impossible narrations, an exploration into the deepest areas of depth and into the most intimate and hidden areas of personality, because female sleep is different from male sleep, because one can be capable of narrating that which cannot be said. It is enough to look, to look at them. They are bodies and they are bodies of women, complete protagonists, with ivory and apricot bodies, suspended and de-contextualised, because in sleep, in their sleep, they have need of nothing, neither surroundings, nor accessories. No description.
There are no point of reference if not within themselves, immersed in a total emptiness that hugs and encircles them, with their ankles resting together and their hands near their faces. They are like Sarah by Jonathan Coe, caught in the uncertainty between dream and reality in The House of Sleep. They are the three stories of Yashimoto that “echo” the emptiness of night in Deep Sleep, because sleep comes to all like “the advancing tide”; because during sleep something made of pure energy happens under the eyelids and images and thoughts flash by, the information settles itself and is disarrayed, memory puts itself in order and then in disorders. In these sleeping forms exists an alteration made of pictorial material, from the tops of the feet, to the tendons on the hands, filaments of colour run from the collar bones to the shoulder blades that intensify and become denser. Colour passes and covers throughout. The hands are enlarged and the wrists have widened and every surface grows until it becomes the main protagonist. “It is the only instrument that gives us proof of existence, our body.”
Infinite attention and devotion towards every element, extreme care in showing every angle in order to highlight it, through veins and rivulets of colour, to give proof of being, even during sleep, while sleeping.
Viviana Tessitore