Master Projects

Master Project

Veronica Mari

ORGANIC TRACES: Kin Constellations among contemporary artistic practices –
Investigating site-specific cultural traces

Organic Traces, Poster of the exhibition, © Veronica Mari

Organic Traces is a curatorial project conceived with the aim of constellating four young artists who are rooted in bordering territories. The symbiosis between their perspectives reveals common strengths by proposing distinct narratives and hybrid expressive languages that disclose the itineraries and perceptions pertaining to their practices. Those that might be defined as their biographical geographies flow into a broad and intertwined mapping of personal and collective themes.

In order to comprehend the articulation and reflection of the research carried out, the core of this project has been divided into three chapters or cluster terms: Site-Specificity, Female Presence and Organic Trace. Each section is interlaced with the other and finds in the named keywords theoretical references and explanatory cases, global or autochthonous, iconographic or etymological, through which the authors are related. The fusion of an investigation with references to significant essays and practices, combined with the realisation of a tangible drawing, is therefore based on the analysis of the three pivotal sections mentioned above. Firstly, it looks at the dynamics of implementation and at the importance of the specific location selected for a cultural event conceived in a small-scale reality, as well as at the possible audience and the type of works displayed. Furthermore, it offers a space to contemporary female artists who operate through multiple narrative media. Finally, the third chapter investigates to what extent and how the organic-visceral trace is an essential element of the pieces presented, in terms of the materials selected, semantically in the analysis of the subjects proposed, as well as in their concretisation.

Veronica Mari, independent curator and photographer, lives and works on Lake Maggiore, Italy. She graduated in Photography at Fondazione Studio Marangoni (Florence) and recently concluded the MAS postgraduate program in Curating at ZHdK (Zurich). Being in 2021, the Intern at Lumen Museum of Mountain Photography (South Tyrol), she conducted research on archival practices and conservation of photographic materials. Curator of Organic Traces in May 2022, a collective exhibition, cultural initiative and editorial publication. She is currently involved in several projects focusing on contemporary evolutions of site-specific art and emerging local authors, including Purificatio with Valery Franzelli presented for Spazio Volta, and a collection of paintings by Antonio Pedretti.