The Last Lamentation at the MAN Museum in Nuoro
Valentina Medda
Edited by Maria Paola Zedda
MAN Art Museum Province of Nuoro
March 28-June 16, 2024
Opening on March 28 is The Last Lamentation exhibition at the MAN Museum in Nuoro, the pinnacle moment of Valentina Medda’s art project, curated by Maria Paola Zedda, realized thanks to the support of the Italian Council (XI edition, 2022), a program for the international promotion of Italian art by the Ministry of Culture’s General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity, the result of a co-production that branches out from Sardinia to Belgium, New York and Slovenia and is led by ZEIT, together with the MAN Museum of Nuoro, Sardegna Teatro, Flux Factory (NYC), and VierNulVier (Belgium).
The exhibition revolves around the video work of the same name, The Last Lamentation, produced between 2023 and 2024, intended for the collections of the MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna: a work filmed in Sardinia and created through research in the area, which tells the tragedy of the sea through a hypnotic choreographic, vocal, sound score. The work reworks ritual codes into contemporary and abstract forms through collaboration with Gaspare Sammartano, composer; Claudia Ciceroni, composer and vocal trainer; and Attila Faravelli, for field recording aspects. Here the
relationship between body, pathos, and landscape is layered by systems of absence and presence through the participation of a chorus of 12 women dressed in black, standing by the sea, an element that by contrast makes the silent presence of the dead more tangible and explodes their voices
The exhibition also brings together a body of works, many of them exhibited for the first time, that the artist created in the early stages of his studies and that converge around the video work by tracing its moments of elaboration: collages, inks on paper, photographs, drawings and some sculptural elements.
Valentina Medda has been researching the Mediterranean since 2018, which initially led her to work in Beirut in residence at the Beirut Art Residency. We find traces of this experience in the collages in the exhibition, which compose a texture that is knotted around an original territory, Sardinia-the artist’s homeland-and then reconnects with the Mediterranean.
Along with the collages, the evocation of the handkerchiefs that accompany the weeping ritual inspired by Cecilia Mangini’s documentary on Apulian tradition, crystallize in the process of solidification through ceramic firing, which burns the soul of the inner fabric, leaving a void, an absence in the sculpture. To complete the restitution of Medda’s research, an artist’s notebook visually collects the scenes in a poetic storyboard. Images of the sea and some polaroids processed as if this water became skin, translate a visual horizon, which is both liquid and corporeal.
INFO
Valentina Medda
The Last Lamentation
Edited by Maria Paola Zedda
MAN_Museum of Art Province of Nuoro
27 Sebastiano Satta Street – 08100 Nuoro
Tel. 0784-252110
Continuous hours: 10 a.m. – 7 p.m. | Monday closed
info@museoman.it
