Silvia Mariotti: The Invisible Front

Carso and the world wars are at the center of the exhibition of Silvia Mariotti, organized within the festival # B SIDE WAR, at Villa Manin. The exhibition is curated by Aurora Fonda and Sandro Pignotti and is a collaboration between IODEPOSITO NGOs and the gallery A plus A in Venice.

The exhibition by Silvia Mariotti tells the legacies of World Wars between past and present, capturing them through their aesthetic and aerial dimension, then deepen the historical connotation.
Silvia Mariotti, through her research, mainly focuses on the investigation of the natural landscape, often the ideal vehicle for a rereading of history, which in this context, sees the Carso as the main subject of her research, its conformation to the man in time of war, from the first world war, leading to the second. The artist assumes a mysterious perspective, created by a refined play of light, which manifested those traits of sublime nature, opening questions about the re-semantization of karst landscapes through the world wars, and their role in today collective memory, becoming a symbol of a sedimented history, painful, also made of interpretations and manipulations.

The exhibition consists of a series of photographic works mainly scattered in the east barn of Villa Manin, which run the story through different interpretations, starting from the conformation of a territory and opening up to new suggestions. In fact, in addition to photographs, the artist intervenes in space with the sculptural elements, references that have their roots in literature, past history and the recent times to show the chain of events that are the basis of these historical events so significant. Through these interventions (some of which refer to the episode of the fire in the Narodni dom in Trieste in 1920), the artist draws a timeline that shows the sequence of events that have been the focus of an ethnic hatred, unfortunately recognizable in most of the conflicts.