And living is so very close to dying.
Laura Vecere, Firenze, 17 giugno 2006

The provisional character of the situations and the images, caught in transit while they are weaving a plot and already ready to move on to the next one, describes an action carried out in the direction of the logic of the fragment, that is to say of that entity which, "rather than as an isolated germ, behaves like a wandering particle that is defined in relation to other particles."
The construction of a fragmentary universe requires, from those who practice it, a daring balancing act between accepting every possible digression, on the one hand, and keeping to the thread of a constant and coherent narrative, on the other. This mental/existential condition traces one of the characterizing profiles of modernity, from Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Schwitters's Merzbau. Art of digression the former, and art of organic stratification, of modeling from within, the latter.
From this trunk branches a line of descent that has shaped the artistic practice of Maria Novella Del Signore right from her earliest works, that is from the time when she made an entropic "conceptual" model the center of her activity. An assumption that confers the paradoxical tone of a fragmentary "organism" on the entire range of her output, and that accounts for the fact that each construction of a space or a thing is never the result of what is conceived within a program planned in advance, but always the outcome of a peripatetic and shifting experience. Here one breathes a sense of atop/a. In fact there is no longer the goal of the grand opus to be achieved, because the work is already set out in the principle of transformation itself. It is therefore in the very nature of its passing and transforming that everything always and inevitably intersects with courses of degeneration and death. Yet the work does not draw back from what appears to be an obstacle, a barrier, an interruption.
Viewed as a whole, the nebulous and fragmentary corpus of her work seems to rotate slowly around an obscure area, that is to say around the very origin of the underlying enigma, continually touched on, alluded to, hinted at and never directly stated. Everything seems to move around a pulsating zone that radiates its effects a long way from its own center which, although unexpressed, anchors the plurality of the manifestations to itself. A nucleus that defines a "sacred" space where, in the darkness of a mystery theater whose deepest root cannot be revealed, a press blends them together and fuses them into an amalgam, life into death, and death into life.
There is a hint of a remote matrilineal origin that runs from the chthonic cults of antiquity through a subterranean vein that no form of patriarchy, beginning with that of Mount Olympus, has ever been able to block permanently, all the way down to our own time. Its underground ramifications nourish the universe of a female awareness (and here it is worth referring briefly to the variations on a similar underlying tone that surface in various ways in the work of women artists who, while very remote from one another in both time and approach, are linked by this thread, Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, Marina Abramovic, Kiki Smith, Mona Hatoum and Ghada Amer, to mention just a few names): ancient and timeless stories that predate knowledge and religions and that belong by right to the realm of the one Lady with many names: Isis, Hathor, Bastet, Artemis of Ephesus, split into Demeter/Persephone. The Body, for this is what it is, of the seed itself, the seed that according to the Gospels must die in order to bear fruit, becomes all one with the primordial body: mother earth, the mistress of the cults of death and regeneration that link the human and plant worlds, and that are reassembled, as Paredro of the goddess, whose death (by dismemberment) and resurrection are celebrated.1
In the construction of Some Bodies Memories there are no relics or vestiges of past actions that are now objects of veneration, but neither are there narrations of a private biography. The itineraries and themes outlined above are brought together again to give rise to a distribution of the works in which they are scattered over a sequence of rooms, each of which is turned into the theater of a bodily memory. A memory that resurfaces anomalous and "peripheral," a long way from its central, cerebral seat. In other words the mnemonic route spreads out like a rhizome, reemerging in the parts/fragments and in different circumstances, to remind us that each individual part is impregnated with the presence of a vaster corporeality that assumes in itself both the organic and the inorganic, both the human and the vegetable. As in the tradition of mythological metamorphoses, all bodies and with them their souls can descend as well as climb the ladder that links the multiple states of being.
And so we come to a long table on which “bodies” are lined up, their surfaces undulating with paraffins and with a greenish light radiating from their interiors, resembling exhibits of alien anatomies; gigantic photos of the wriggling bodies of dead lizards, pictures taken on the side of the road; photos framed with bumished iron depicting a sequence of the youthful hands of a maiden saint, posed in attitudes of sacred representation. But we
also find showcases with fallen nests, frames/canopies that enclose fragments of glassy surfaces, rippling with meanders and acting as skin/shield to a toxic content of alumina, over which plays a livid yellow light. On a layer of tar is laid a chest, almost a nuptial bed. containing waves of white material in movement: disintegrating remains or moments of dawning. Signs of reawakening energy that has not yet defined its field of action? The moving substance seems to have designs of its own, almost beyond the intentions of its creator, animated in a movement of self-organization. This is an important trait of Maria Novella's work that allows her, in total complicity with the material, to provoke an effect of reactivity in it, setting it in movement with a touch as if she was just passing it by and stirring in its inner core an endogenous force that projects it, internally invigorated, toward an unknown goal.
At the base of this practice lies "confidence." A confidence whose source is faraway, in that consciousness of not-knowing, which does not cover things with the crystalline case provided by the interpretation of the rational mind, but which installs itself inside them to observe the intimate oscillation that dwells with them and “which makes them the place of infinite transits, of infinite possibilities.”.2

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1. U. Pestalozza, / miti della donna-giardino. Da Iside alia Sulamita. Milan: Edizioni Medusa, 2001, p. 177. ↑
2. F. Rella, "Lo sguardo ulteriore della bellezza," in G. Battaile, La Parte Maledetta. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri,2003 ↑