Oikeiôsis

The knowledge of one’s inner self as the sole tool for self-fulfillment, for stoically embracing the human condition in all its turmoils — that is what ancient Greeks used to call Oikeiôsis. The same word was chosen by Mara Palena to call a project that unfolds over the duration of existence. The analog images shot by the artist from her childhood to today do not follow any external precept. Instead, they are subjected to continuous alteration which seems controlled by an individual state of conscience — sometimes fragile and melancholic, sometimes romantic, sometimes sharp or even violent, yet never graspable, just like memory itself. This infinite body of photographic works is the artist’s actual body, whose cells are the poetic intuitions that have beaten the passage of time. This body gives itself to the collective by welcoming the viewer in a large, shared mnemonic archive where each image triggers a sense of empathy in the life experience. Image after image, the artist rewrites that white sheet of paper that is at the same time life and death, love and repulsion, fashion and disuse, reprocessing and acceptance, singularity and multitude.