Open Studio

MAYA WEISHOF | GIORGIA GHIONE

28. 7. 2016

Opening

On the 28th of July, at 7pm, Zaratan opens the doors to the public to present the artworks by Maya Weishof and Giorgia Ghione, artists in residency at Zaratan AIR 2016 during the month of July.

Throughout the event, the artists are going to occupy part of the gallery and to open the doors of their studios to show their works and projects.

The research of Maya Weishof explores the translation of the landscape into an image in order to open a field of poetic and pictorial possibilities within the artistic universe of landscape. The will of Man to build a possible image of the reality to dominate the landscape that surrounds it, reflects itself in the act of mapping the place that inhabits or the space where he aims to arrive. It was, and still is, one way to understand the world - synthesizing the space into a line, as the speech stays for writing. The chromatic and gestural intervention on the surface of a map is a possible intervention in the "real landscape" and vice versa. The possibility of recreating territories, border conjunction, imaginary spaces that cross the two-dimensional plane and come to exist in the third dimension; possible routes, times and people. "Try to see the ocean" (“Tente ver o oceano”) is an invitation to recognize the landscape through the word and through the trajectory; your and my ocean; to consider the landscape as a map and the map as a landscape. Painted maps installed maps, maps of a place that exists or that are possible places: try to see the ocean.

The artworks by Giorgia Ghione have a strong performative and participatory component. With "Moschicida" the artist generates an absurd encounter between a candle and an inflated balloon, which provoke the explosion of the balloon and the extinguishment of the candle, where we realize how each one of us is fatally attracted by his own fears. One of the recurring themes in her research is the idea of displacement and translation, as in the project "K.O.D.A.K", which provides an absurd collaboration between people who speak three completely different languages: they can not discuss about philosophy, but they can perform the task of building together a camping tent. Still, in "Your home is where you are (not) -Lisbon" activates a collective reflection on the duality between the home where oneself is born and the house that oneself chose to live, an unstable balance between two lives, two ways of being and perhaps two identities. To delimiting the focus of the project, Giorgia decided to interview a series of individuals coming from Italy who moved to Lisbon. Finally, in the video performance "Non so più nulla" Giorgia invites Maya to create a blind portrait to each other. What kind of image we have of a person that we see every day when we close the eyes?