clots
MARTINA CIOFFI – 2022
The site-specific installation is made of stoneware on pine stumps that fell during the 2018 Vaia’s storm. The artist intervenes by insinuating herself in correspondence with the cuts, the wounds of the roots, with ceramic elements (clots) with ambiguous organic shapes, inspired by the inflorescences that the tree gives life to in order to reproduce.
Their clarity and silvery change, at times alien, aims to disorient the visitor through the ambiguity between shapes and colors, between signs of life and death, between familiar and stranger. The shapes of the right clot are inspired by the male microsporophylls, made of small yellowish spheres collected in a cone that then disperse in the wind. From the carcass of the left root, whose clot is instead inspired by female inflorescence (from which the common pinecone is born), a row of vertebrae stretches like unlikely shiny barks, creating a short circuit between the plant and animal kingdom.