[testo in italiano]

In a greenhouse

All the artists that work with those who attend the Botteghe dell’Arte, at the former mental hospital Paolo Pini, have to cope with their own immediate ability to build relationships and to establish strong bonds. In other words, a maieutic attitude has to be one of the strongest features in every project, whose purpose is above all to reconnect the broken threads of language and meaning. In this sense the work of Marica Moro satisfies these demands perfectly, not out of mere self-interest but for an inner necessity, because it is born with an exact metaphoric disposition that sometimes even displays a slight didactic tint.
The seed that germinates and becomes a person (human beings, too, are generated from a “seed”, according to a beautiful image rooted in tradition), the seed that is “cultivated” in a flowerpot and that, afterwards, escapes from its environment as well in order to go off into the world – or, on the contrary, gets entangled and cannot flee from it, until it dries out – is as simple a metaphor as it is effective. It is so for those who admire the final result – an installation and a video animation – but it is especially so for those who make it, and we must not forget that this is also a collective work, although directed in its guidelines by the artist.
Therefore we cannot avoid asking ourselves which of these “creatures” are more similar to us, whether the ones that finally succeed in leaving the pot – metaphor of our milieu, of the first years of our life, of the “culture medium” in which we all spend our childhood and youth - or the ones that get trapped in the very environment that brought them to life and helped them grow…
Eventually everyone has the privilege – granted by art, but not by life – to “choose” his or her own flowerpot, to decide which kind of “boundaries” – red, yellow, blue, decorated, transparent – to grow in. Or, as in our case, to grow again.

Marco Meneguzzo