Silvia Giambrone

Butchery

I have no more words of love
In my language.
That’s why I want yours.
Marble memories your veins on the counter

– You are not a danger to me –
Will be written on your tombstone.

Silvia Giambrone

Silvia Giambrone
(Agrigento, 1981)

Silvia Giambrone investigates the addiction to violence through the use of different expressive means such as embroidery, video, performance, photography and sculpture. Violence understood as a sick part of an apparently immutable family and social ritual, something so internal to the fabric of life that it is no longer recognized as such.

Her works are a powerful device for reflecting both on the taboo that surrounds this drive and on the perverse ability to subject others using an affective and relational grammar that is socially accepted and to which we are so addicted that we can no longer recognize it as such.

The sculpture Il Danno (2019) is a headless female bust which, with its generous curves and the very pronounced mount of Venus, recalls some sort of primordial Great Mother despite her absolute contemporaneity.

It is the bust of a woman who wears an elasticized post-partum girdle, to recover her silhouette lost with pregnancy and which shows in some crucial points how the unnaturally squeezed flesh overflows irrepressibly from her elastic tissue prison.

The woman’s body is not only the favorite battlefield of state and church, but also of the modern consumer society, patriarchal and liberal, which has always wanted to tame the image of the female body in a canon of aesthetic perfection that is difficult to embody and painfully frustrating.

This work makes us reflect on the profound separation that exists between the real woman and the consumerist projection of the ideal woman, a daily contradiction that appears quite evident in Italy, a factor perhaps largely due to the media hegemony of junk television.

The second work is a small sculpture entitled Duino Elegies n. 1, inspired by the homonymous poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. It is composed of an amethyst geode and a clay part which, unlike the first, allows to leave a mark on matter, letting you activate a visceral connection with it.

That mark is a bite. That clay looks like flesh. Naturally, the bite could only be left on a soft part such as clay, in fact the geode by its very nature and composition does not allow a mark like this to be left on it.