Galleria Studio G7 presents Project Room, a new initiative dedicated to emerging personalities in the contemporary art world, aimed at promoting and sharing new national and international artistic explorations.
Mara Palena opens the project with The Window, a solo show curated by Laura Lamonea which features a new film interwoven with a series of previously unseen photographic artworks.
The video was filmed in the artist’s childhood home, where she moves through the rooms, experimenting firsthand with the relationship between her adult female body and the domestic space in which she grew up. In this microcosm, charged with memory, daily actions blend with reconstructed and intimate gestures performed in front of the camera. The changing light marks the passage of time, interspersed with black-and-white images. The large window, doors, and objects, central elements of the narrative, are framed in compositions that evoke the stillness of photography. Here, time seems to slow down, trapped in the impossibility of fully capturing human experience.
Yet, in her domestic walks and repeated gestures, a desire emerges to intervene, to grasp, to transform fleeting moments into material for understanding.
Despite the apparent insignificance of human existence when measured against the vast scales of time and space, the artist focuses on a sequence of minimal, interconnected events. This interplay of small actions turns the everyday into a field of possibilities, where past and present converse, rewriting each other.
The video’s soundtrack is taken from Automatic Popular Music, the 2023 musical project by Nicola Ratti, who mixed three tracks from the album specifically for this work. Structured around rhythmic and harmonic repetition, the compositions are built almost entirely from sounds generated by programmed modular synthesizer automatisms, punctuating the enigmatic score that Mara Palena constructs with her body and the surrounding space.
ph Francesco Rucci
The study of behavior and memory processes has been a core element of her research since its inception. Between 2018 and 2020, she created the trilogy A Study on Behaviour in collaboration with lead performer Jessamine-Bliss Bell. In this work as well, the temporality of the image plays a central role, becoming a perceptual material, even though everything unfolds within the span of a single day.
The photographic series Reprojected Movement captures certain objects from the video, scanned from film footage and later preserved in boxes with opaque glass. Photography serves as a starting point in the artist’s practice, only to be manipulated and altered, playing with perception and memory.
The selected objects, relics from a childhood living room, are stripped of context, function, or emotional associations that make them familiar or part of everyday life. Instead, they become pure form, opening up to new possibilities of meaning and relation.
Laura Lamonea
Mara Palena 