2018 [prints on perforated PVC, 200 x 300 cm]
“The Spirit of Resistance is a photographic work made during the summer of 2017, a year after the earthquake that destroyed Central Italy, in particular, the Marche and Umbria regions. Frapiccini tried to track reference points of her childhood trips in the area, in the villages on the Apennines in the Marche region. Meanwhile, the earthquake, with its disruptive impact, shook up every memory and changed every order, depriving this places of their identity.
In The Spirit of Resistance images, a figure stands motionless in between ruins and houses’ debris. The figure wears a gas mask, which hides facial features and the expression of any feeling. Its presence is a metaphor of a dark and melancholic circumstance but at the same time an expression of belligerence and resilience. Collapsed facades reveal a glimpse of the interiors of apartments that, over the years, keep on revealing their lives in the past; their history comes to the surface through the architectonical elements and the furniture, still intact. Through gaping wounds, scratched into the skin of surface, it is possible to catch the intimacy of personal remembrances and the collective memory of the community. The photographs, printed on perforated PVC, take on a light and clear consistency, inviting the gaze to go through them as if trying to see what’s beyond them. Every fragment seems to fix a memory that tries to resist to the oblivion, while vegetal elements rise between ruins, as signs of cyclicity of life and of continue becoming of nature.”
[text by Anna Musini]
EXHIBITIONS
School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK / Solo show The Art of Memory / 5 – 18.12.2019
Italian Cultural Institute in London, The United Kingdom / Solo show Scratched Surfaces, text by Anna Musini / 09.02. – 02.03.2018
