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Maria Magdelena Campos-Pons

Maria Magdelena Campos-Pons
Library Shelf Location 18.MAGD
Publication Date 2006
Description

Published on the occasion of the exhibition MARIA MAGDALENA CAMPOS-PONS

June 22th through September 10th 2006

 

Cuban artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons develops her research starting with experiences that leave their mark on her life, as a Cuban woman expatriate in US. Campos-Pons joins together attestations from different cultures, connecting in her syncretic works detached elements.

Sono qui came from the artist’s recent stay in Veneto, it consists of installations, video and drawings expressly created for her second solo show at Galleria Pack. With this exhibition, the artist wants to establish a dialogue between African and Afro-American cultural identity, and North-Italy craft’s tradition, creating resonances and echoes between the two specific languages.

The Cuban artist recorded her feelings about the black presence – that in Italian cities is often perceived through stallholders – within a particular socio-cultural reality, still not ready for integration. Standing at a certain distance from official historic tale, Campos-Pons show a special care for micro-stories and for individual experiences, reaching, after that, a collective dimension everyone can catch. Works on display have a strong visual and emotional impact and came from made and unmade relationship, from memories’ slag put together as mosaic tesseras, whose combination change the work of art into a prismatic and articulated sound box.

Her polysemic compositions produce a dialogue between different cultural codes and social rules, in a transculturation’s process (after the idea highlighted by Cuban antrophologist Fernando Ortiz). The artist says: “identities can be painful, restrictive and dangerous. My idea about a search for identity is to embrace the other, to understand the other, to share in a space of similarity. In the search for identity we need to mark the differences but what we want to find in the end are similarities ... I have spent a lot of time thinking about how the current discourses of identity can become discussions of exclusion instead of a dialogue”1.

Theseissues-recurrentinartand linkedbothtopostcolonialstudiesandglobalizedculture’senlargementand gender’s matters – find in Campo-Pons’ works alive and organic features. The establishment of an inter-human relationship, the necessity of feeding on other experiences, push the artist not to stop at her already heterogeneous cultural identity, but to keep on searching comparisons with other kind of living, often mark with exile from someone’s own homeland.

ISBN 9788883413452
Quantity 1
Pages 143p
Authors Martina Cavallarin, Sergio Risaliti
Format Hardback
Publisher Galleria Pack, Milan
Related Artist Maria Magdelena Campos-Pons
Category Artist (relating to a single artist/collaborative team)
Artist's Nationality Cuban
Languages Italian, English

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