Private Project
Gualdo
Hands are a metaphor for the whole body. They reveal the stratifications of life’s stages, they are the medium of actions, of the doing. Cartographie du corps traces a map of the skin, of wrinkles, of gestures that speak about an engaged life, still filled with energy. We see an aging woman's body as full of beauty, a beauty that comes from the layering of her experience - the experience that can be etched into her face or the history under her skin as wrinkles form.
Susan Meiselas & Marta Gentilucci partnered to capture in images and sound the vital force that inhabits these bodies, the intensity of their past lives and the enduring hope of the life that remains to be lived. We wanted to transmit force that opposes illness, loneliness, deprivation, and hardship. The installation hopes to create an affirmative feeling toward the potential of aging years, against the representation of old age as the absence of opportunity.
Within the chapel of Saint-Blaise, the installation creates a sense of closeness and intimacy, to present a choral image which draws on and shares the collaboration with each woman. It is an immersive landscape that transforms in time the spatial relationships, shaping a site-specific approach into a collective experience. Visitors moving through the exhibition may feel that the passing of time is not necessarily a loss, but rather an opening of possibilities, of strength, of confidence to live well with the time that we have.
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