Vedere Con Le Mani

Paola Anziché’s exhibition at the Pavillon Social Kunstverein in Lucca catches on from a trip to Baku, in Azerbajan, even if the works on view are part of different families and times.

Paola Anziché – protagonist of an exhibition at the Pavillon Social Kunstverein in Lucca – makes a portrait of Baku’s living body.

Her work with textile fibers involves the system of signs which coat the body with the costume. The costume, an anthropological fundamental condition: attitude, assumption of behavior, of gesture, of inter-relationships; and also a tool in order to become part of the (urban) scenery. For Lévi Strauss, foreign populations take the costume from each other first thing, the clothing.

Paola Anziché, <i>Voci 2</i>, particolare, 2012 — Paola Anziché, *Voci 2*, particolare, 2012

In this kind of mirroring between populations and globalization, the fabric of the city is here considered like the tissue and the fibers of the bodies: thus these are portraits-architecture, which originate from contexts, places, people, materials, stories. It’s not a coincidence that we now bring back the attention to the painters of Lucca of the 18th and 19th century. It seems that a new order of migration is born, detected by the artists; and a new idea of metamorphosis is unearthed (born from the series of unburied images, because the term today is buried, as a matter of fact, with the meaning it brings with itself, in favour of the more structural isochronistic feeling): or else, in particular, she proposes the idea that the Yurkas works, made of vegetable fibers, are houses-roofs to wear.

To sum this up, the medium is born along with the doing and the doing is also an idea. In her work, for example, almost as if she’s imitating the Maggis, popular representations, the renewal of the natural world is imitated, creating a microcosm of shrubs, fibers and colours. Experiences-situations that Lygia Clark called propositions.