Maïmouna Patrizia Guerresi
As a photographer, sculptor, and installation artist, ‘Maïmouna’ Patrizia Guerresi reveals unique and authentic sensibilities in her narration of the beauty and subtleties of racial diversity and multiculturalism. Over an established career, she has developed her own symbolism, which combines cosmological and ancestral traditions belonging to various European, African, and Asian cultures. Her personal commitment to Baifall Sufism has led her to produce an aesthetic that is able to bridge time, space and civilisations, as well as figuration and abstraction.
The human body is seen as the nucleus and temple of the soul, a place that houses a delicate, higher awareness; the very conduit for encompassing natural and cosmic forces. More about mysticism than any singular religion, her work is visionary in that it restores those elusive qualities of sacredness and unity in our frequently dehumanising and fragmented contemporary visual world. Her classic iconographic style explores the universality of human experience and reclaims the often hidden nurturing powers of feminine energy. Presented as a kind of free flowing epic, the viewer is left to read the significance of her imagery and quietly meditate on its potential to personally engage with its audience. As if her figures were speaking directly to each one of us.
From her earliest experiments with the physicality and archetypal imprinting of the psyche, through to her latest, evermore metaphoric ‘inner constellations’, Maïmouna insists on a cross-cultural discourse and an expansion of the boundaries that normally dictate our individual attitudes. She invites us to see further and to look deeper – past skin colour, preconceptions, and ethnic landscapes – into the wider paradigm of inclusion. She leads us through apparently simple notions of dimensionality into the exquisite, mystical and fragile complexities of life from within. - Rosa Maria Falvo,
In 1993 or so, I was working as an intern in the library of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I was doing all the things you’d expect of an intern — re-shelving books, entering new acquisitions into a library database. Being an unsophisticated troglodyte, most of what passed through my hands essentially escaped me aesthetically. One day though, a pamphlet about the works of radical architect Lebbeus Woods stopped me in my tracks. I was transfixed by sketches of weirdly alien environments and artwork superimposing bizarre structural outgrowths and outcroppings upon photographs of existing real-world cityscapes. The more I read the more I was fascinated, and happily it turned out there was more to Woods’ vision than just fancy — a lot of his work was a direct sociologically-informed response to areas disrupted by war or natural disaster, hypothesizing (for instance) pole-vaulted homes like these “high houses” that would be essentially structurally immune to the whims of planetary tectonics, and so forth. Sad to learn that he died last year. I have a few of his books and they remain as wonderfully jarring and transfixing as ever.
The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.
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| — | Frank Herbert (via beingascripturient) |
