Duetto à mi voix

Marta Margnetti and Shirin Yousefi use clearly identifiable formal languages. Starting from their own experience they approach themes linked to the female question. The title that they have given to the exhibition, "Duetto à mi voix", refers to their collaboration and their dialogue. Born and brought up in the Tessin (Switzerland), Marta Margnetti is interested in the relationships between the women of her family through the perspective of her own recent experience in becoming a mother. Shirin Yousefi left Iran after the post-electoral uprising in 2009 and has since developed a politically based narrative. In spite of their different trajectories in life, their artistic work imagines various forms of resistance to repressive power in the private sphere and in society. A monumental doorway becomes an impenetrable painting, another opens with several hands, skewers that have become weapons manage to pierce a wall; a cheek that is pinched to colour recalls the tyranny of “you must suffer to be beautiful”; the women tell stories, speak of their grandmothers and of their childhoods, their struggles against oppression. References to corporality weave subtle connections between the work of the two artists. Items of furniture speak, light up or open by themselves, and vacuum cleaners demonstrate; a hanging item of clothing suggests the pain of punishment and possible resistance; metal supports warn of an uncomfortable wait; fragments of the walls become a body envelope; at the centre of a citadel of bricks, cypresses gather and rise as a symbol of liberty. Marta Margnetti and Shirin Yousefi share creative processes which often begin with materials such as ceramic, metal, fabric, recycled objects, and finish with pieces honed down to the essence of their meaning, enigmatic but powerfully evocative, in which personal references progressively dissolve. The importance of the imaginative act, today more than ever, is referred to by Matteo Meschiari in his book: “La grand estinzione” (Armillaria, 2019) where he writes: an individual, a group, a people without imagination is automatically a victim of those who control images in their place. Because of that, to imagine means above all to engage politically”. "Duetto à mi voix" evokes murmurs and whispers which, in spite of their low intensity and fragmentation, achieve unity in a strong and unique voice.