Who is Pinocchio? (Exhibition)
Everyone is born a child.
A piece of wood is born a child.
Puppets are made, by the hand of a father, by the hand of a mother,
by the fingers of a hand that must earn money.
But what do you know!
The road is long. The road is mine.
I have lost the dream I have lost the thread.
Erminia De Luca
On 5 December 2023 from 6 to 9 p.m. we will open the exhibition ‘Who is Pinocchio?‘ by Erminia De Luca.
The exhibition will be on display until 7 January 2024.
The exhibition consists of 7 illustrations extracted from the book ‘And now it depends on you‘ inspired by ‘The Adventures of Pinocchio, story of a puppet‘ by Carlo Collodi, where the artist has selected some of the original texts to place side by side with images created by her. A work that starts with the photographic image of black and white landscapes of the Tuscan land, and the pencil with which the characters are drawn, photography and drawing merge into a single vision. Collodi’s writing is in the dialogues, faithful and unaltered, and becomes graphic form.
For the production of this work, which is in fact an artist’s book, Erminia wondered who Pinocchio was, a bratty child? A big man playing hide and seek? A piece of wood dissatisfied with his status as a vegetable? Who is this puppet who has become known all over the world and why.
Everyone knows him, but few have read his story. Which for adults represents an endless series of misadventures; made up of deception, misery and bravado; and for children is the Walt Disney cartoon, which has very little of the real Pinocchio.
It turns out, this reading, to be a journey of initiation. The story of all those who leave their father’s house and go looking for themselves. A story of freedom and loss, a continuous death and rebirth.
Remaining faithful to the book, but with a different perspective on the completeness of the tale, the artist has chosen to represent a piece from The Adventures of Pinocchio. The dialogue between the puppet and the animals and how the dimension of nature participates in the path of initiation and transformation from what one believes one is (in this case a piece of wood) to what one is (a child).
The artist will be present at the opening and it will also be possible to view and possibly purchase the book.
ERMINIA DE LUCA
Apulian by birth, Milanese by profession. He was born into photography, with a self-taught background. Between 1994 and 1999 he worked in Apulia and Rome, focusing his research on themes ranging from still life to self-portraiture, in particular through the use of negatives or special treatments at the printing stage. During this experimental period, he collaborated with the Centro Culturale il Fotogramma in Rome.
In 1999, she moved to Milan, thanks to a two-year scholarship that allowed her to attend the University of the Image of photographer Fabrizio Ferri. She thus began to move ‘outside herself’, finding in the natural landscape her new subject of investigation. The subjects of this second phase of her work hover between lightness and a quasi-abstraction of forms. Since 2015, he has been contaminating photography with other languages and means of expression, leading to multidisciplinary art projects in which the photographic image merges with pencil drawing and writing. The investigation of human feeling is the main theme of his work and, in his artistic explorations, he uses different media to give substance to a feeling, making it approachable to the soul through visual poems.
SUPEROTIUM
SuperOtium is a house in the heart of Naples designed to welcome tourists, artists, travellers and creative people. A meeting place where artists’ residencies, meetings, exhibitions and accommodation coexist, to inspire artists and creative people and question travellers’ assumptions, proposing new perspectives through which to look at the city.
SuperOtium’s residency programme has featured, among others, Kensuke Koike, Pietro Gaglianò, Massimo Uberti, Hypereden, Bianca Felicori (Forgotten Architecture), Paz Ortùzar (in collaboration with the Cervantes Institute of Naples) Giovanna Silva (in collaboration with Lorenzo Xiques), Nuvola Ravera (in collaboration with Made in Cloister), Blase (in collaboration with ShowDesk), Yasser Almaamoun (in collaboration with the Goethe Institut), Khaled El Mays (in collaboration with Edit Napoli).
www.superotium.it