Solo exhibition in BABEL, Trondheim (NO) 2023
After seven years of residing outside of my birth country (Italy), I started noticing a slow but significant decline in my ability to speak my mother tongue.
What is missing in my italian vocabulary are not mainly nouns—even if every day more and more tend to fade away—or verbs, but gestures.
My mother body is what I am losing, not my mother tongue.
Losing your mother body explores questions of translation, linguistic identity, and bodily memory, using the book “Supplemento al dizionario italiano” (Supplement to the Italian Dictionary)” as starting point. The book, published in 1963 by Italian designer and artist Bruno Munari, includes illustrations of the most typical gestures used in Italian along with explanations of their purpose and execution. Approaching this book as a study guide, I am trying to relearn forgotten Italian movements, retrieve them from her memory and with them an identity.