< back

Daniela Di Maro, La memoria dell’acqua, 2016 (frame) video DV-PAL, 11’
courtesy of the artist

Daniela Di Maro

Endowed with an interdisciplinary and multimedia nature, Daniela Di Maro’s works come into being as part of an extensive research on the issue of symbiosis – often mediated by technology – between man and the environment. Ranging from visual installations to artists’ books and to photography and video up to exhibits presenting speakers, sensors and software programs, in her own works Di Maro sets up a system of scientific and anthropological references which are intertwined with symbols from the natural world.

Her artist’s book A Case of identity (2016 - 2017) can be regarded as a good example of the above-mentioned practice and as a publication stemming from a thoughtful investigation of the self. The book is devised as a multimedia text in which the written word and the images compensate for and sustain each other. It is also analogically realised with texts printed by means of movable types interspersed with images which are developed on photographic paper and then applied to the pages. Moving from the analysis on the physical body, Daniela Di Maro questions herself on topics such as the origin and meaning of human life and finds an answer in the simplicity of nature. The artist calls for an awareness of our human condition, always straddling the line between microcosm and macrocosm.

A case of identity functions as the starting point for her second work, Lithosphere (2017), a huge patchwork realized by the artist out of fabric clippings in the shape of the Earth’s land surface. Daniela Di Maro, instead of placing the clippings so as to recreate the current structure of the earth’s crust, sews them very close to each other thus shaping the image of the Pangaea which, according to the theory of continental drift, was a single super-continent gathering in itself all of the Earth’s land surface. Drawn from geology, the image is employed to symbolize the overcoming of today’s socio-political divisions and borders between people and nations.

A similar approach towards temporality can also be found in the video La memoria dell’acqua (Memory of Water, 2016). The included sequences come from amateur found footage of an iceberg detaching from a glacier. In this video, produced by Daniela Di Maro, the sequence of the shooting is chronologically reversed and, therefore, the re-forming of the ice sheet is shown. Just like in Lithosphere, images come to symbolize the necessity for a strong change of direction not only in current environmental policies but also in our individual and collective awareness through which a new equilibrium between man and nature shall be established.

DB