Unbuffered Zones
Here let me stand di Marianna Christofides e il loop dell’archeologia estrattiva
Abstract
The art and practice of Marianna Christofides stage the geopolitical divide by challenging the line between fact and fiction, in past time and present time. Facing the stranger thus takes on a diachronic dimension, displaying the contradiction that images of the past offer us to create new contradictions in the present. Such a projection gives the dual concept of the foreigner common to all migrants a claiming character and real expressive power. We seem to glimpse that for Marianna Christofides the foreigner is never just at the gates (or at the check point) but properly and deeply within herself too. In 2013, during a long stay in London devoted in large part to investigating in the National Archives and the British Museum the topic of British colonial legacy and Cyprus’s complicity in predatory practices, Marianna Christofides came across Alessandro Palma di Cesnola’s volume Cyprus Antiquities. The pages – and especially the illustrated plates of this volume – became the raw material Christofides used to shape her work Here let me Stand, exhibited in the following years first in Berlin, and then in Italy, in Palermo and Turin. The static images of the Cesnola collection are unified in a slow, continuous, incessant shot: an endless horizontal shot, a load that indicates the mirroring self-acceptance of compilation and expropriation.
Presentato: 23 Gennaio 2025 | Accettato: 13 Febbraio 2025 | Pubblicato 24 Luglio 2025 | Lingua: it
Keywords Palma di Cesnola • Extractive archaeology • Decolonial art practices • Marianna Christofides • Antiquities in contemporary art
Copyright © 2025 Luca Bombardieri. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-917-7/009