Matilde di Pietropaolo
Italy
Matilde’s research examines the possibilities of man to travel through states of consciousness and to experience subtler layers of reality. Following this intention, she creates installations designed as devices of experience. Systems designed to lead the user into the realms of the unknown and the imagination. These are works that come to life under the action of water, air and light and which, thanks to the help of these elements, transcend their physical limits by expanding within the host space, up to assimilate it as a mediator of the 'approach of the user to the work. For reasons inherent to their functioning, my works often clash with the problems of applied physics, in particular with those of optics and mechanics, but their true direction is metaphysics.
https://matildedipietropaolo.pb.design
Response to the question:
”TERRE LIQUIDE”
“Memory is a function of the human mind, without which we would not be able to perform many types of activities such as learning something, empathizing with someone or going home.
This department of our mind should be a kind of archive where we store all the informations, the impressions and the understanding that we get through our life. This resting data can be either called back intentionally through a mental effort, or they can come back spontaneously to our mind, as the result of external sensory stimuli or events.
Whatever the cause is, to remember is to ask to data taken in the past to come back into the present moment, creating an experience that has something to do with, but that is not the one we had lived.
Indeed, if an experience is a complex event made out of a situation and of our perception and interpretation of it and more, if we can’t consider our self as an only person (but as a multitude of people coexisting together into one body and as an always changing being); it seems obvious that to remembering something means to generate an unprecedented experience of knowledge. A new situation made out of the data stored into our mind and of the person we have become until that moment and more specifically or of the person we have in when we are remembering. This should be perhaps the reason why, we sometimes feel to get more cognition of a situation through the remembrance of it, rather than what we had got when we had lived it.
Memory is also a very precious tool for the work we do to get into the state of presence. It is indeed the archive where we preserve all the tools we have get to free our self. In this place we can found: the comprehensions of how our unconsciousness works, the memory of the situations that usually involve us to identify with something or to get negative, the paths that we have learned to get out from the labyrinth of our ego and more, it is the place where we conserve all the emotional's experiences that we had by getting into the state of presence. Memories that feed our desire to get back there.
Following their nature, this data can arrive by chance to remember to us to be; or they can be recalled by us, to be used intentionally as helper to succeed into the aim to be. Personally I program my memory to become a button for the presence; as an instrument that respond to a input - a situations that often occur in my daily life - sending me an out put - the remembrance to climb into a a different state consciousness - so to transform some unconsciousness’ topic of negativity, into the stimuli to get out of it to let blossom the state of presence.
During the Rabbit Hole experience in Napoli each of the participant has work for me as this kind of button, working at the same time as an image of the state and as an input for the desire to be.
In particular, in those days I felt to shared with you a single large archive made of the memories and the understandings that each of us had accumulated separately in his own life. An open source system made available to everyone, from which everyone could take what was needed to grow, so to enrich one-selves through the experience of others (and at the same time, enrich others through their own experiences).”
Performative Installation 2021
(Mirrored aluminum sheet, prisms, transparent solids, buckets, motors for aquariums, rubber tubes, speacker, amplifier, sound composition, lights and water)
Terre Liquide is an installation realized, through a performative action, for the final event of the artistic residency The Rabbit Hole. More than a finished work, it represent for me the first physical experiment I've realized, moved by the desire to introduce new transformative dynamics into my immersive installations.
The main object of the installation was a mirrored steel sheet. This object was the reflection field on which to draw images to wrap the space’s walls. The water, some prisms and others kinds of transparent objects, were my paint and my brushes. Below and adherent to the reflective surface, there was a sound's amplifier connected with a speaker, that worked as the transformative element of the whole work.
Being a performative installation, I've begin the action with an empty steal's field, to then add one after another the objects and the water flows; so to shape a liquid landscape expanded into the room, by means of light. Part of the work was also a sound composition that act into the installation as the generator of impromptu events of movement and transformation.
The composition indeed, alternate long period of silence (stillness) to other moment of frequencies' emissions. These, transformed into physical’s vibrations, were making the objects move on the sheet and the watercourses diverting from their routs; so that when the silence was coming back, the old landscape was replace with a new unpredictable one.
