[testo in italiano]

In the warmth of the greenhouse

Entering a greenhouse is reassuring and gives a sense of safety, of tenderness and of friendly shelter. It is here that everything begins in nature, in the metaphor of the seed that germinates in the warmth of the greenhouse, giving life to a being that is half human half vegetable, half man half plant. At first its steps are uncertain, but then it becomes more and more confident when it jumps from the pot to the floor and ventures beyond the limit marked by the transparent walls of that small building whose purpose is to nurture life. And suddenly its generation makes the screen completely green, the colour of life that moves forward.
But the video goes immediately back to dwell on the container, the pot, from which life sprouted forth and half-reveals, underneath the cracks that make its surface crumble, the red colour of blood, which soon covers and invades the whole screen. The initial joyful sounds of nature, the harmonious twittering of birds and the rustling of leaves, turns into a dull, measured, incessant noise.
Pain is necessary, inevitable, essential in order to give life, to generate human life. The metaphor of the seed’s transformation and of the bud that grows into human form explicitly symbolizes motherhood, the moment when life is born and then becomes independent. The separation from mother Earth, from the warm and cosy cradle of the mother’s placenta generates pain, a pain necessary to life.
It is not so for the seed that doesn’t germinate, that remains imprisoned in the earth and is bound to wither with the passing of time, as shown in the second part of the video. There is no pain, only a vague sense of unexpressed suffering in the short story of this second seed that will never know life.
This is the subject-matter of In a Greenhouse, the video animation made by Marica Moro with the collaboration of Mauro Lupone, composer of the soundtrack. The simple and straightforward language the artist has always used in her works serves here as a filter to investigate a central theme in philosophical speculation: the generation of life, the sense of existence and of non-existence. Just as in fairy tales, the story is clear, absolutely intelligible, but also profoundly true. In the seed that becomes man we find the key of the whole universe, both for those who believe in God and those who place their trust in evolution. What really matters and connects these two points of view is the idea of generation, whether we consider it the fruit of divine will or the result of mysterious cosmic combinations. And the choice not to “come out” of the earth is seen as an impossibility to give life.
In some of her previous works the artist had investigated the relationship between man and nature, comparing the physicality of human body with that of leaves and tree trunks, just as in the installation of Plexiglas leaves containing photographs of hands or in the fingerprints that are laid over the rings in the cross section of a tree. With In a Greenhouse the artist continues her investigation, reaching a result which is extreme, ancestral, losing the boundaries between human and vegetable being.
Despite the intimate nature of this work, the artist makes use of techniques that somehow succeed in cooling and keeping physicality at a distance. The language Marica Moro has been using in the last few years bows to the necessity of establishing a filter between the drawing or painting and the observer. In the video, through projection, the drawing comes alive and is given pre-arranged times. Even in object work the execution is complex and strewn with several barriers, which, being transparent, are invisible but absolutely real. First of all, the drawing is made into digital form, with a technique that cools the pencil’s stroke; the track that gives life to the work is filtered by the computer screen. After the first phase of this process, Moro continues with the superimposition of colour and the insertion of the sheet into a Plexiglas bubble. So the flat surface of the sheet is now limited by the physical, three-dimensional space of the bubble, that transforms the image into something mysterious and remote. The actual distance between the Plexiglas surface and the surface of the sheet is emphasized by the bubble’s curvature. At the same time the object that comes out, a reminder of spinning tops or souvenirs, calls to mind the playful world of childhood, a condition, then, in which our cultural superstructure did not exist at all. In this way Marica Moro obtains a simple and straightforward means of communication that excites our curiosity to know and to understand.

Elena Di Raddo