La casa è fiorita by Paola Valenzano

We open this new course with Paola Valenzano, an artist we had the opportunity to meet during the screening of the film Lunàdigas, or women without children in her studio “L’Arte perfetta” in Rome. It was love at first sight, a mutual fascination, a dialogue still open that led us to think that this new exhibition space was truly needed. The urge.

Paola’s works deconstruct the traditional concept of the family, rummaging through its asphyxiating ties, within the topos of the holy martyred mothers offered as a sacrifice and of the fathers also trapped in confining roles, in the ancestral guilt of those who do not respond to social expectations, in the emotional blackmail of those who live for their children and who don’t let their children live. But love is also at the heart of Paola’s works.

The real love, the one essential to understand that so much of what we have received as a token from our families, is part of a centuries-old tradition that we now feel the duty to tear down, but that we can still understand, forgive, reconnect harmoniously to the complex framework of our identity, in order to embroider new patterns and trace new paths.

“This exhibition draws on works ranging from 2005 to 2022 and from my intimist period, – Paola explains – randomly and circularly recapturing some personal and family themes and some long-lost works, which I recently reworked with new awareness and motivation.

The House, as a family of origin, can be a place of caring and nourishment but also a place with the most insidious conditioning, internalized by osmosis. It is the place where, commonly, desire or the rejection of the family is cultivated.

A place – more than anything else – surrounded by denial and public narration on the Good Mother and the Good Father, which we then find, transferred, on a broader and collective level, into the image of the Motherland and the Good State, which often requires inhuman sacrifices and, sometimes, real human sacrifices too.

But this place is also the training ground par excellence of our humanity and can be crossed with the firm will to see and understand, that is to take it WITH you. Only afterwards you can stop judging and you can let go of everything that has been.

At that point the transformation will have taken place, the same one that takes place in childhood’s fairy tales.

The wire that once tied, it now joins
The past has been hard but now the house is  gentler.
The nest-house has blossomed. ”

“prendo pArte” starts from this.

Instructions:

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