Luca Monterastelli and Marzia Corinne Rossi, MAMIHLAPINATAPAI

Room 20

Luca Monterastelli and Marzia Corinne Rossi inhabit the same room. Their works have different poetics, they face each other in space and challenge each other, almost as if they were playing stone, paper and scissors. To put it simply, these are the materials their sculptures are made of. The two artists share a home and studio, yet their works have a strong aesthetic and conceptual autonomy. Their coexistence is a constant tension. It lives in the expectation that the other will take the first step and in the hope that expectations will coincide. Mamihlapinatapai, an untranslatable word from the lexicon of an endangered population in Tierra del Fuego, sums up this restrained power, indicating the act of “looking into each other’s eyes hoping that the other person will do something that both of them long for, but neither of them wants to do first”.