COMMISSION #7 – GINEVRA COLLINI

The IUNO conceived by Ginevra Collini (Rome, 1996) for the summer solstice is a stele produced by the layering and crystallization of personal and universal memories.

Its formal characteristics seem to place it somewhere in between the material tradition of votive nature and the one of funerary art, an ambivalence confirmed by the same inscription that decorates its surface, a sentence in English, Female Sadness Has Lasted Forever (La tristezza femminile, esiste da sempre), which, while presenting itself as a statementrefers back to commemorative epigraphs through the use of characters stylistically akin to Latin ones.

The imitation of the ancient suggests an attempt to eternalize its content, which is closely related to the re-proposition of a literary and artistic topos that, declined in contemporary times, takes on the value of a stereotype: Collini, in fact, reflects on the concepts of melancholy and sadness traditionally associated with the feminine, attributing them to Juno, an all-powerful, vindictive and proud figure, and at the same time to herself. Through a process of reversal and subsequent adherence to the canon, she testifies as much to its effectiveness as to its tendentiousness.

The iconographic and conceptual upheaval carried out on mythological imagery allows for the re-proposition and simultaneous nullification of the categories of thought associated with it, while the autobiographical component, testified by the photo depicting the artist as a child, associates that same idea of spleen with a personal experience, specifically located in the period of childhood. The effigy thus stands, in this sense, as a representation of an emotional evolution, identified by the artist in a moment of life commonly perceived as far from any kind of negative feeling.

The gap produced by the contrast between the individual memory and the stereotype is the same created by the contradictory nature of the material composing the work: the hardness of the stone, a typical support for engraved epigraphs, is here replaced by the softness of glycerin, an organic, exuding and transparent substance that, although destined to change over time, equally attempts to eternalize the image of the artist's face, which appears hieratic, like an icon.

Myth thus takes the form of a remembrance, an intimate and subjective narrative that renders its immutability a tool in the service of autobiographical storytelling.

Ginevra Collini, Female Sadness Has Lasted Forever, 2023, photograph and glycerin, 21 x 29 x 5 cm

Text by Giulia Gaibisso