Chiara Scarpone

I was born in the South of Italy, in a port on the Adriatic Sea.
There, we don't go out on summer afternoons because it's too hot. The evil eye can make you sick and there is a statue of the Virgin in almost every house.

There, the boredom is fierce. To survive, people tell stories, tales and legends; they sing songs that are transformed by word of mouth. This constitutes the common identity of the village. I have always been fascinated by the hypnotic power of oral tradition. Over time, I realized that it deserved special attention which would find expression in my artistic practice.

My graphic identity is expressed most of the time through subtraction techniques, for example through scratchboarding , in which I scratch the black to bring out the images that haunt my universe.

Linocut allows me to engrave a trace in the material. Its reproducibility through printing involves a process of obsessive repetition of signs and symbols that I have appropriated and which come as much from rock art as from graffiti. Drawing has always been my favorite means of expression. My intention is to go beyond the narrative dimension of this medium and explore it to its maximum potential by touching on other forms of visual art such as installation, photography and performance.

I am looking for manifestations of human concern, the richness of which is expressed in anthropology and popular culture. It is fertile ground, in which oral tradition, magic, the power of symbols, the castrating violence of religion have crossed time to settle in ours.

I translate this deep interest in anthropology through drawing with the intention of sharing my questions:

Why and when did human beings need to develop symbolic thinking? Why are we looking for answers? How does this undergrowth of symbols and beliefs coexist with our times?

When I walk around observing the sick beauty of the city, reassured by the comfort of modernity that surrounds me, I wonder where our ancestral fears are hidden: death, the unknown, the fear of the feminine. And as I walk, I look at my shadow and I let myself be surprised by this silhouette which retains something of the monkey...a monkey with a great imagination.