two exhibitions by Mara Palena curated by Marta Cereda and Matilde Scaramellini
In this dual exhibition, Mara Palena ventures into the terrain of traumatic memory, bringing to light the deepest layers of the unconscious through video installations and photography. Here, time dissolves, and memory takes shape, creating an intimate dialogue between the individual and the collective. The exhibition project suggests a reconnection with one’s own history—a physical and conceptual passage that, in the artist’s work, becomes an experiential archive shared with the audience. A safe space where the weight and beauty of human existence resonate between sound frequencies and classical music notes.
Il tempo entra ed esce ed io con lui is not only a figurative movement, as every piece in the Careof space is living memory: a Polaroid encased in ice, revealing a rose as it melts—a testament to fragile yet persistent resilience.
Exposing the most intimate psychic mechanisms that emerged during EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy, the artist does not shy away from the traumatic events of her past. Instead, she guides the viewer through an exhibition that leaps across time and space, following perception before stepping back to observe it from a distance.
In EMDR therapy, the concept of a safe place is crucial. It is used as a resource during treatment, an imaginary mental space co-created by the patient and therapist. This place serves as a tranquil, comforting, and threat-free environment where the patient can mentally retreat at any moment to find relief from stress or anxiety. In the spaces of Pananti Atelier, Palena constructs Posto al Sicuro in much the same way—a shared emotional refuge where the gallery walls do not merely contain the artworks but rather embrace and protect what the artist and the audience wish to hold onto, fear losing, or simply seek comfort in.
Il tempo entra ed esce ed io con lui, curated by Marta Cereda, Matilde Scaramellini, CAREOF, Milan 2024 photo credit: Diego Mayon
Il tempo entra ed esce ed io con lui curated by Marta Cereda, Matilde Scaramellini, CAREOF, Pananti Atelier, Milan 2024
Mara Palena’s entire artistic practice revolves around a reflection on human emotions in relation to time, memory, and identity. In her installations, she uses photography, sound, and video as a starting point, manipulating and altering them to explore themes of memory and individuality. An awareness of human fragility is a central, almost obsessive element in her research, which focuses on the study of emotional states.
Conscious and unconscious, present, memory, and projection blur in the existential fragments that the artist layers within her projects. She draws from various methods of self-exploration, including psychoanalysis, sound therapy, and EMDR—practices she has personally experienced and later reinterpreted through her own unique artistic lens.
Yet, this intimate sphere expands into the collective, constructing immersive scenarios that empathetically welcome the audience into a vast and potentially infinite mnemonic archive.
Mara Palena 