The work of Anna Maria Maiolino presented as the fulcrum of her contribution to the Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters<\/i> \u2013 Um Momento, Por Favor <\/i>(\u201cOne Moment, Please\u201d), 1999-2004 \u2013 involves geographies of oceanic distance, profoundly significant for the artist\u2019s biography, bringing them closer to a single point \u2013 indeed, a single moment \u2013 of encounter: on the one hand Italy, Maiolino\u2019s native country, evoked through the song \u201cNapule Canta\u201d (1958) by the Neapolitan singer-songwriter Roberto Murolo that the artist herself interprets, overlapping the original track and offering an execution that remains faithful to the interpretative act of one\u2019s own memory, rather than attempting to achieve the flawless, alien (and perhaps impossible) perfection of \u201cauthenticity\u201d. On the other hand, Brazil \u2013 Maiolino\u2019s adoptive country where the artist moved very young with her family, and where her children grew up \u2013 is present in the film as the phenomenological site of the performative act recorded by the camera in 1999. Evoking the past is not, for Maiolino, a nostalgic exercise but a poetic and epistemic practice that has to do with the ongoing construction of her own identity as a woman, as a woman artist, and as an emigrant and immigrant woman. The final version of Um Momento, Por Favor<\/i> is dated 1999-2004, encapsulating the extended time between the genesis and the publication of the film. The moving images show extremely close-up glimpses of Maiolino\u2019s face, which never allow the vision of a whole \u2013 the close-up is a filmic style very present in her creative vocabulary \u2013, composing a visual and aural self-portrait, intimate though fragmentary, which the artist herself has defined as a \u201ccartography of worn and aged skin, like certain territories that appear degraded and deserted.\u201d Responding to the invitation to participate in Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters<\/i>, Maiolino has generously chosen to donate her work Um Momento, Por Favor<\/i>, 1999-2004, to Collectio<\/i>, almost as a further act of intimate truthfulness and claiming of her roots intertwined between continents and different eras, immersed in the passing of time and in the unfolding of space.<\/p>\n
Anna Maria Maiolino (1942, Scalea)<\/p>\n