LUKE 2:49 - 1977

International exhibition:" IL VOLTO SINISTRO DELL'ARTE" (The Sinister Face of Art) conceived by Romana Loda, Florence.
Series of 16 photographs with graphical / typographical interventions, each photograph measures 30x40 cm.

This work originates from a sentence in Luke's Gospel, where words, alternatively deleted and drawn close to various images, open to 16 different meanings. In such a disarticulated way, the symbolic order of the text, excluding and misogynous, leaves to the surface the unforeseeable richness of the possible.

"WHY WERE YOU SEARCHING FOR ME? DID YOU NOT KNOW I WOULD BE IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE?" LUKE 2:49

The metaphorical value of the photographic image and the progressive erasing and modification of a text have enabled Libera Mazzoleni to revisit chapter 2, verse 49 of the Gospel of Luke and release it from the rigidity of its unequivocal reference to the supremacy of the Father in the Son's existence.
Erasing is a way of emphasising other ways of reading it that open it up to new and different interpretations; what is removed, in fact, accentuates what remains, and what occasionally survives establishes itself as the remainder of troublesome concerns within what was meant to be the core theme of the original issue: the exclusive and exclusionary patriarchal-type relationship between Father and Son.
Following the play between words composed hurriedly in the dark and words exposed to the light during various stages of an artistic operation which amounts to a work in progress through a number of developments, a fragmented, unpredictable and confusing narrative emerges that overturns the order of speech and undermines the rule that presides over it.
From initial certainty, which appears as a declaration of belonging to the one from whom he originates, we pass to an uncertainty of his identity, to doubt about the meaning of the relationship which, in allowing space only for obedience, prevents the son from being born to the singularity of his own existence.
We are therefore faced with the search for a "self"; a subjectivity which, in order to exist as such, must invoke the denied mother, must evoke "the other silenced one," the woman who in acknowledging herself as the bearer of a difference, breaks through the barren and paranoid logic of the Same, establishing duality and thus undermining the stifling and mortal power of the One at the onset.
Words that are written and gradually erased impose on images that evoke an earth covered in rocks and flowers, a network suspended over the void with a few torn meshes offering a passage, bodies of men and women side by side in physical contact, tender embraces, the look seeking confirmation of their own existence in the face of each other, women's shoes as a metaphor for the rejection of a man embittered and impoverished by the misogyny of patriarchy.
Revisiting the words, erasing them and arranging them in new horizons of meaning then has the feel of a liberating action, a poetic deed that unmasks the univocality of logic with its suffocating, cast-iron rationality and reveals a glimpse of the infinite abundance of imagination.
Graziella Longoni

“The text determines both the law and its bearer, established by an initial exclusion. The biblical text is the history, projected into myth, of the symbolic community and its statute: the discourse about the Father and the Son, subject to law can't help but correspond to woman's exclusion from understanding its dictates. [...] Therefore the reality of the subjects subjugated to the law will always be a dual reality in which one excludes the other by posing itself as the only one, silencing diversity by the same act of giving it a name: having a name is the necessary premise to enter the symbolic order. To the logic of the only one, women oppose, as we know, the "at least two" of the revealing of the text's meanings, meanings of oppression, seeking in the despotic set of names the signs of one's own disappearance. The text contains the paranoia of power representing it as law; the at least two stands up to it revealing it as a sign and as the result of a removal/repression” Giorgio Verzotti