Highly visible secretly hidden

SPOT3 Highly visible secretly hidden

Donatella Di Cicco

 curated by Adriana Rispoli| Eugenio Viola

Madre Museum, Naples

16.04.10 | 10.05.10

The third exhibition of SPOT series, Highly visible secretly hidden, by Donatella Di Cicco, opens Friday, April 16th at 19.00 at the Project Room of MADRE Museum.

SPOT is a project that develops through a cycle of exhibitions dedicated to young Neapolitan artists with the purpose of turning the spotlights on a still unknown and transversal art scenery. It alternates with TRANSIT, another exhibition programme, which builds up a network with the Middle East, whose fourth step Napoli – Salonicco will be opened at the end of May.

For her first solo exhibition in Naples, Donatella Di Cicco presents Highly visible secretly hidden, a movie made of three video-portraits: a father, who’s also a husband and a partner; a woman, who’s - above all- a daughter and a young Ukrainian girl. But the main character is the absence: the lack of a mother, whose vivid memory is recorded by the video camera of the artist, that films the objects and the everyday life of a lonely father. And yet, the lack of another mother: Vera, who’s been working in Italy for a long time in order to guarantee a better future to her daughter Halina.

The artist deconstructs the movie grammar, giving to every single little story their narrative autonomy, exalts the method, underlying the making process and experiments new ways of representation aimed to the breakage of the predetermined narrative system.

A diptych video will be on display; it recalls the style of amateur films, in which the documentary aspect usually prevails on the aesthetic one. It is a silent tale of two different but parallel stories, that testifies the past, the experience and the family life of these two young girls.

Various experiences, recounted in Potrebbe essere cresciuta all'infinito, a “box/container” where the narration is finally atomized: the photos sent by Halina to her mother during her youth interweave with the thoughts of another daughter, who, on another hand, tries to metabolize the pain of her mother’s loss.

Images mixed with annotations and memories, where the two stories merge and mingle into potentially endless meta-narratives. Scattered traces that are eventually recomposed, in the primal narrative unit, into an artist’s book, displayed in the Museum’s bookshop as a further simulacrum of memory.

The research of Donatella Di Cicco is suspended between film ambition, documentary approach and the peculiar versatility of video-art language. Highly visible secretly hidden won the first prize “Vela d’Oro” for Best Documentary at the 27th Edition of Bellaria Film Festival in 2009.