Le Stanze di Mauve in ciò che è conosciuto come il Reame dell’Irreale / MRZB exhibition

- exhibition, curator

Associazione Barriera, Turin

03.10.2020 – 27.02.2021

Mauve had become friends with a small bit of awkwardly-knit wool too shapeless to be a scarf, which she kept shut away in a box hidden like a treasure deep within a wardrobe and which she took out each night when she was alone, turning off the lights out of fear that her neighbors might, peering through their jalousies, notice her.

She would have happily dreamed of gloves but such a dream was too insidious, too absurd for her to imagine that the piece of fabric could one day become something else. It was nothing more than a rag, an unfortunate cast-off that she defiled doggedly.

That rag became the only thing that seemed to touch her in the silence of the rooms of her house. In the night, taking it from the box, she would have carried it into the bed, squeezed it in her hands, to close it back up again into the closet.

One evening, she put it in her jacket, reached the kitchenette, hopped three times over her shadow and, still for a moment, heard a sudden whisper.

‘’The rooms are like a body’’ it whispered ‘’where everything must relate intimately’’, from an echo it suddenly became a dot, a darkened puncture in front of her head, that, starting with low undertones, ventured into thicker and thicker rhythms.

As a marionette whose thread the operator has let go for a moment wakes to a new life, she got up and went out on the streets to collect fragments, dresses, drapes, books, miniatures: a root, a rock, a stone, a broken glass, a piece of paper, anything lost, left or abandoned became for her a mirror for anything expressing a void that her community had filled with edifices and monsters to understand the absence of ground.

As her life progressed more and more isolated, there corresponded an even more intimate relationship with that piece of fabric, with the jacket and with all those things that, in a fortuitous encounter, gave life to a more and more clear-crisped voice, a presence.
One night, when the voice echoed up to her bed, she turned it inside out, treading its intensity with a pen. Words circled around themselves crumbling in larger and larger holes, blurs of ink and textures. The paper folded around her hand and in a snap of a finger, cracked.

It passed a long time and nobody heard or ever saw movements in the old house.

One day some men found the door open and entered.

Few moments later they were running out of the house through the alleys and the city streets, yelling:

Zhi will briik thrugh all our holiz
Until what’z lift will bi juzt a largi largi holi
That holi that ztinkz of our deathz
Zhi will briak through that az will
And whin ivirything iz opin
Zhi will ztart ovir again
That’z thi way it iz zuppozed to bi
that’z thi way it iz zuppozed to bi
that’z thi way it iz zuppozed to bi  


Photography by mrzb

photo-documentation on TZVETNIK