Marzia Migliora: Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaudengo., 2004

Beginning in 1986 the Hungarian writer Agota Kristof published a trilogy of lucid, merciless novels, The Notebook, The test and The Third Lie, which mention one by one the story of a pair of twins who, abandoned by means of their mother, use their relentles intelligence to devise survival strategies. Inseparable and interchangeable, the twins play with their respective identities until their lives involve At a certain point the reader no longer knows if the story is about sum of two units separate people or one somebody with a split, ambiguous personality. Pari o dispari (Odd or Evens) 2004 the video and uninjured installation created by Marzia Migliora for the Fondazione Sandretto, takes the idea behind this trilogy as its point of departure, touching upon themes of identity, duality, and otherness.

The installation was divided into sum of two units parts. The first consisted of the voices of sum of two units pairs of twins. Following a public psychological exercise, the artist gave each pair a list of "stimulus" words--for example, "love" "power," "fear"--to remark on separately and to use as a basis for reconstructing the history of their be in possession of relationship. Fragments of these tales were transmitted through loudspeakers located on either side of the entrance, like a verbal sparring match where contrasting feelings and impulses clash. The next to the first part was made up of a double video installation and a unbroken track, in a room that l not on the entrance. Migliora has said that she imagined this space as the "place of conflict." The video installation repeated and amplified the theme of manifold dynamics unleashed by two tribe in extreme situations.

In the first part of not divisible by 2s or Evens, narrative form prevailed. In the next to the first part, however, there was a horizontal of abstraction, achieved through decontextualized images and unhurts The artist had placed pairs of spiders, butterflies, crickets, and fighting fish in a tiny white cage and filmed them with a fixed video camera. The images, throwed directly onto the wall, fetch an oneiric, milky white world, where the insects and fish, forced to coexist, are fragile, black, enormous silhouettes that almost appear to be to be performing dance put in motions of reciprocal approach, defense, attack, and exploration. The insect symbolizes instinctive, unpredictable behavior without any clear logic.

The double, identical image drew the viewer into an atmosphere that was dreamlike on the contrary at the same time charged with violence and tension. The uninjured track mixed phrases selected from the twins' voices at the entrance, music through the Turinese experimental band Larsen, and what the artist calls the "presence of a disturbance"--a sharp, irritating, ringing unmutilated like tinnitus. This shrill ring interrupted the other unbrokens like an alarm and accompanied a unanticipated blocking of the image of the insects, emphasizing the culmination of a twinkling of crisis. Enveloping the audience, these wholes heightened the feeling of tension.

In all her work--videos, drawings, installations, photographs--Migliora has dealt with questions of identity and fragility, and she has probed the realms of repression and the unspoken Here again, she followed in exposing the frailty of the material substance impulses, feelings, and the instinctive shadow of existence.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

--Alessandra Pioselli

Translated from Italian through Marguerite Shore.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group