Mia Madre Ride - Il rapporto tra l'artista e la madre

My Mother Laughs

The relationship between the artist and the mother. An investigation in the form of a dialogue

A meeting with four artists to discover the relationship between the creative gesture and the maternal figure.

Does the artist need the mother to create? Does he need her support or her contrast? Is the mother the root to be rediscovered or torn out to feel free to do?

Each guest will tell his or her own experience and that of the artists he or she studies.

The title of the meeting, My Mother Laughs, is a tribute to the experimental director Chantal Akerman, from whom it takes the title of her book, the only one translated in Italy thanks to the publisher La Tartaruga.

Guests

GIULIA MAGNO

Curator and director, Chantal Akerman tells the story.

Chantal Akerman (1950-2015), a multifaceted artist, director, screenwriter, writer and actress, is considered one of the most revolutionary and influential figures in the history of cinema. Her 1975 masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, was recently recognized as the best film of all time by Sight and Sound, the prestigious magazine of the British Film Institute. Born in Brussels to a family of Polish Jews who emigrated to Belgium, Akerman has dedicated her life to art, addressing issues deeply linked to identity and memory. The figure of her mother, Natalia, a concentration camp survivor, plays a central role in her works.

Giulia Magno is a director, art historian and curator. Her films have been presented in international institutions such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, the Serpentine Gallery in London and the National Galleries of Scotland. She has collaborated, among others, with the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, curating exhibitions and reviews that explore the connections between cinema and the visual arts. In 2017, he curated the largest Italian retrospective dedicated to Chantal Akerman at the MAXXI museum in Rome.

CARLO VECCE

Academician of the Lincei, scholar of the Renaissance, writer, talks about Leonardo da Vinci.

Leonardo and his mother Caterina had a very strong and denied love relationship. Caterina loved Leonardo more than her other children. Leonardo loved her in the same way but he could never tell her, he could never call her mother, and she had to pretend that he was not her son.

Carlo Vecce, scholar of Renaissance civilization, among the greatest scholars and experts on the figure of Leonardo, has written, among others, the books: Leonardo, la vita (Giunti 2024) and Il sorriso di Caterina. La madre di Leonardo (Giunti 2023).

GIULIA CORSALINI

Teacher, literary critic, writer. Her latest book is La condizione della memoria

La condizione della memoria (Guanda editore, 2024) tells the story of Anna who decides to spend a summer with her now ill mother in the house that her mother lived in as a child, no longer their property, and which still preserves part of the original furniture and relics of the life that had inhabited it.

Anna says she tries to "find in me my mother, my father, my dead, it wasn't possible, it wasn't conceivable that everything would end like this", but memory, she realizes, is made of unreliable material.

Giulia Corsalini lives in Recanati. She is a teacher and literary critic. She collaborates with the Leopardian Chair at the University of Macerata and with the National Center for Leopardian Studies in Recanati. Her areas of research are: Giacomo Leopardi; Luigi Pirandello's letters; literary translation; literary anthologies; the relationship between literary criticism and literature teaching. She has dedicated four monographs and numerous essays and articles to these topics.

In 2018 she published her successful debut novel La lettrice di Čechov with nottetempo, which won her the Mondello International Literary Prize and the SuperMondello, among others.

SARA GARAGNANI

Illustrator and art director, in 2022 she published the award-winning graphic novel MOR Storia per le mie madri

With MOR Storia per le mie madri (add editore) Sara Garagnani has built a graphic novel by bringing together visual art, psychological sciences, sentimental literature and even poetry, managing to transform what is a textbook path of psychotherapy into a story that spans several generations.

The theme of her work is the legacy of pain from mother to daughter: ancient wounds, unwelcome suffering, which, preserved inside those who experienced them, have transformed into dark evils, ghosts that forcefully govern people and their relationships years later.

Sara Garagnani lives in Bologna, she is an illustrator and art director. She has published several works and illustrated books that have earned her various awards. With MOR she won the Comicon Napoli 2023 award and the TIR award (established in Milan by the magazine The Italian Review).