MARIA LUIGIA GIOFFRE

Residents of November 2021

Born in 1990, an italian artist active since 2015. Starting with a background as a photographer, her practice moves towards visual art, writing, theatre and performance, creating scenarios that push the visual element in a dramaturgical set. Each of her works can be seen as an interplay of actions, narrations and objects working as tools of poetry that blur desire, loss and wait, encompassing simultaneously a personal and universal imaginary.

Graduated in Politics in 2012, she approaches visual art and theatre as self-taught and with directors she collaborated with. In 2017 she obtains an MA in Practices and Philosophies of Photography at Central Saint Martins in London and then she wins the Celeste Prize. Maria's work took part in various exhibitions, symposia and it is part of academic and non-academic anthologies mapping young contemporary artists in Italy. Since 2019, her work is present in the collection of Italian Embassy in Turkey. She is founder of In-ruins, a platform for residencies and contemporary art research in archaeological spaces.

Maria Luigia Gioffre focused her time at the residency toward the urban space of the city of Galatina and what she describes as absence of people within the historical centre of the town (no restaurants, no bars open, streets are silent) until 6 pm when everything changes and people come around. “A place ready to be inhabited but yet profoundly empty. You can notice human presence exclusively by the clothes hanged on to dry outside in terraces: this interstitial state is poetry further than urbanistic.”

She worked on an installation that has at the core the aim to make this poiesis visible : sitting on on the ancient Mignano, (balcony which once in Puglia was reserved to look at life in streets for women who had no right to stroll outside) and experiencing the city through that perspective. She also brought forward a performance research on southern feminine working with local artisans, which was then elaborated through theatre devising.