Grazia Toderi

An epidemic is the very same evolution of a world which has lost its purity, existing because contamination exists. It has developed through the very mutations produced by the contagion between heterogeneous elements.

To protect oneself: to withdraw into the sterility of a capsule, sealed within the silence of a bell jar with the space itself, with fragility and beauty, sustaining life and the world outside with only the bare minimum. To live in an ascetic microcosm, where nothing can be lost because nothing can get inside.

Or: To shatter the shell violently and finally draw the first breath. With oxygen and through contct we allow ourselves to be contaminated, nevertheless developing as always an adequate immune system. To deny one’s own survival is to assert the priority of our very own lives. To risk, transform, to substitute a beauty ( a perfection and a beauty which corresponds to non-time).

To expose oneself to the epidemic only to overcome it means the ability to change things, to accept the risk of loss and of transformation. It means to change things, aware that we ourselves will contaminate the world. To liberate fragility is to draw into light the freedom of living.

Grazia Toderi

Grazia Toderi
(Padua, 1963)

For Grazia Toderi the video is an expressive means that gives immateriality to the image and places it in a timeless dimension, like painting.

“I imagine the video as a fresco made of an emanation of light – she said in a conversation with Ester Coen – I can’t forget the wonderful ones of Assisi or Padua, and I am fascinated by its iridescent but impalpable material, and by the fact that it is not an object and has no weight (and which has also the discretion of being able to vanish when it is turned off).”

Her first production in the 1990s is characterized by an attraction to everyday actions and apparently domestic gestures, relating to universal gravitational forces.

The first videos are shot with a fixed video camera, with the presence of objects taken from the domestic context that are nevertheless immersed in estranged atmospheres, from which a sense of unease and violence soars.

In the following years, the investigation expands from the individual perspective into a collective, fantastic and cosmic dimension. The observation point rises towards aerial views of stadiums, arenas, theaters and cities, to get a point of view that is unreachable and not perceptible to the human eye.

Zuppa dell’eternità e luce improvvisa is conceived as a tribute to Thomas Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain, to the years the protagonist Giovanni Castorp spent in the sanatorium to treat tuberculosis.

In the video, it is the artist herself who becomes the protagonist, who is filmed, in apnea, totally immersed in the water while she tries in vain to walk, to open and close an umbrella, to protect herself with an object. A sense of emergency connotes this experience, where hostility is not so much identified in the environment but in the will on the part of the protagonist to move in that space without gravity.

As Toderi observes, “space is immobile, that of an underwater environment, but it is as if I were in a storm, a non-existent storm, given only by my will to perform an action, even if forced and useless like opening an umbrella underwater, in a physical condition where instead the only thought should be the exasperated attempt to survive, the absolute need to breathe, to save oneself.”

Grazia Toderi’s research was brought to the attention of critics with her participation in the edition of Aperto ’93, on the occasion of the XLV Venice Biennale, where in addition to the video Nontiscordardime she exhibits some photographs, including Happy Birthday. Her work was also awarded the Golden Lion at the 1999 Biennale for the best international participation, together with that of Monica Bonvincini, Luisa Lambri, Bruna Esposito, and Paola Pivi.

Lara Conte