Sabrina Mezzaqui, FORSE NON SIAMO QUI PER DIRE: CASA, PONTE, FONTANA…

Room 5

The works chosen for this exhibition are photos and have to do with the window and the landscape.
When the words land, the moment the words come to us, they come in and speak to us, then they speak through us. The words arrive on earth and we pick them up through our senses: hearing, sight… Like the rain that arranges its own order of drops on the window pane and the sun that filters through the shutter and draws patches of light on the kitchen cupboard.
Marks. The book consists of 60 images: photos of birds in flight taken between 2005 and 2009, whose sky colour has been removed and replaced by the paper of the page. This work is a visualisation of the word contemplate, as it appears in the dictionary: Contemplare [vc. dotta, lat. contemplari ‘trarre qualche cosa nel proprio orizzonte’, da templum ‘spazio o circolo di osservazione che l’augure descriveva col suo lituo per osservare nell’interno di esso il volo degli uccelli’] (Il nuovo Zingarelli, Vocabolario della lingua italiana, Zanichelli).
I think of a passage from Rilke’s Ninth Elegy, where he says:
…Perhaps we are here to say: home,
bridge, fountain, door, pitcher, fruit tree, window,
at most: column, tower… But to say, understand it well
oh, to say things like that, that in that way, they themselves, in the depths,
never intended to be…
Sabrina Mezzaqui

Sabrina Mezzaqui works at home, not in a studio, in the hills of Bologna, a few kilometres from Ontani’s Vergato and Morandi’s Grizzana. They too worked at home, perhaps a characteristic of the area. Sabrina works sitting at the table, cutting, engraving, folding, threading, thinking and looking out of the window. The world passes you by, always changing, and you observe it, I don’t think she studies it: she lives it, rather. There is a lot of manual skill in her work. There is a lot to do, time seems to thicken. Her work itself is the measure of all the time the artist has. The life that passes and that the work marks out, like the geometric repetition of a litany of tiny, imperceptible variations.
Massimo Minini

Sabrina Mezzaqui was born in Bologna in 1964. She lives and works in Marzabotto (BO).