COMMISSION #10 – GROSSI MAGLIONI

Sospesa a mezz’aria, la IUNO di Grossi Maglioni (Francesca Grossi e Vera Maglioni) sorveglia lo spazio pubblico sopra cui è posizionata. La sua ombra, proiettata sull’asfalto e soggetta alle oscillazioni del vento, sembra simultaneamente difendere e incombere, incarnando la natura ambigua e contraddittoria della dea, insieme materna e vendicativa.
The title of the work, La creatura divisa, confirms this suggestion and anticipates the same formal characteristics. Divided on a symbolic level, the figure is also twofold in its components, two chromatically complementary and iconographically opposite silhouettes, one male and the other female. Fixed together, the silhouettes seem to testify to a possible reconciliation of conflicting identities and drives, allowing the subject to be read in both human and animal terms, as a hybrid generated by the splitting or multiplication of identities, genders and species.
Associated with the figure of Juno, Grossi Maglioni's creature takes on a further form: deprived of her classical attributes and endowed with a more complex iconography, which considers and legitimizes the different aspects of her character, the Roman goddess frees herself from her role as mother and wife by taking on the eponymous epithet. In this way, she renounces her human semblance and becomes a 'newborn', an irreducible being, foreign to any category and definition of identity.

Grossi Maglioni, La creatura divisa, 2023, mixed media 

Text by Giulia Gaibisso

Photo Credits: Cecilia Chiaramonte

The artwork was realised with the collaboration of the fourth grade classes of the primary school H.C. Andersen, I.C. Pio La Torre, and with the support of the Creative Living Lab 2022 - Luogo da Favola project