Guest Artist: Ginevra Mastrocola, 19, Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan
Ginevra Mastrocola, Monomania
My name is Ginevra Mastrocola, I'm a nineteen-year-old Italian student at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan. I aspire to combine a lot of different art mediums, from painting to video art, installations and performances. I have been dancing since I was six and I have been studying arts since I was fourteen. After a challenging childhood where my parents got divorced, I was introduced by my relatives to the world of arts. Any kind, from music to photography and painting. For the past five years, I've been studying contemporary dance, and after the pandemic I understood its power. The trauma of COVID-19 and my psychological therapy led to my artistic growth that I'm still exploring. I keep evolving.
The installation I'm presenting was the conclusion project that I created after five years of artistic high school.
The Artwork and the Vision Behind It
The work is called "Monomania," a Latin word used in the XVII century for obsessions. My installation is presenting an obsession that is a common fear in artists, the terror of not being capable enough. This fear leads to art block, and then, if you don't fight it, to giving up. Unfortunately, this kind of fear also exists outside the art world.
Ginevra Mastrocola, Monomania
The Process
I was seventeen when I had the idea, and then got the chance to realize it a year later. I wanted to recreate a fraction of my mind, a dreamlike dimension that reflected my subconscious. I chose a room for the installation, covered part of the floor with white bed sheets to symbolise a bed and a soft ethereal dimension, as the colour white is associated with the divine and purity. Then I placed a painting easel with a white canvas on it, with no art supplies to paint with. In front of it, a metal stool with a metronome on its side. The only noise in the room was its slow ticking. Lastly, I put a tribute to the artist Lucio Fontana on the wall, a tiny canvas completely ripped, that symbolises his aim to go beyond the normal perception of art, brought to absurdity because of the multiple tries.
The spectator had to go into the room alone and sit for five minutes on the stool looking at the empty canvas, doing nothing. Most of the people that entered stayed for way more time without noticing. They said to me they were completely immersed in the sound of the metronome and the atmosphere, feeling the kind of fear and block I wanted to share.
Ginevra Mastrocola, Monomania
Before disassembling the installation, I took some photos and videos with my friend Federico Mondini (also a student of the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera) and my professor. I was dressed completely in white to match the atmosphere I've created and used long-exposure to have a ghost-like appearance.