MURMURES
The word delicately poised
Contemporary art exhibition curated by Domenico Iaracà
Six women artists, Silvia Beccaria, Tonina Cecchetti, Silvia Granata, Mirna Manni, Sabine Pagliarulo, Simona Poncia find themselves surprisingly gathered around a meaningfully titled project: Murmures.
Rome, Museo delle Mura
24th february – 8th april 2018
Opening 23rd february, 5.00 pm
Like a mirror reversing a world in which communication – both public and private – is getting more and more deafening, six women artists find themselves surprisingly gathered around a meaningfully titled project: Murmures. As if to reinterpret the Aristotelian concept of virtue, these artists are interested in finding the balance point, or an antidote to incommunicability – whether the lack of communication is due to excessive noise or to a refusal to acknowledge its very existence. The means they choose for this purpose is the language of art: by following their own personal, consistent yet ever-changing codes, these artists give utterance to their innermost thoughts and feelings – each of them employing the materials and working in the media that are most suited to their individual lines of research.
The space reserved for the exhibition was not chosen at random: it is, in a sense, itself an oxymoron. The monument is a perfect example of a silence pregnant with words, if not with fully fledged stories about this centuries-old edifice. It is a perfect metaphor in stone for the murmurings of these women artists: having stood on the edge of a great, chaotic city since antiquity, between the chaos of life and the soothing silence of the Parco della via Appia antica, the Walls have been a silent witness to the fall of empires and various nostalgic attempts at restoring them. When the greatest empire was still standing, these Walls (Mura in Italian) heard a language that had been able to unite a myriad of territories and culture – admittedly, by means of an army. It is therefore not by chance that the French term murmures finds its perfect homograph in the Latin word murmures.