All That She Wants
acrylic on Fabriano paper 300 gr, viariable dimensions
song text written by Melania Fusco, voice and music by Serafino Monaco
 MAC, studi d’artista, Padova (IT)


Brutally reinterpreting famous portraits of the Virgin Mary, a series of paintings on paper depict a desperate female face, frozen in the impermanence of her cry. Mary-symbolic of the role of the female body in Western and Christian culture-is annulled from her sacred individuality to multiply into a series of fetishes that compose a broader critical discourse on the control of the body as a reproductive machine-both in a biological and capitalist sense.
The installation was triggered by an audio track inspired by the way preachers in the Middle Ages interpreted and explained frescoes to the faithful, who were mostly illiterate. A figure somewhere between a storyteller and a pop singer, the performer interprets and reveals what is happening in the work, leaving room for free interpretation and magical misinterpretation. The lyrics of the song are an ironic exercise in imagination that explores Mary’s intimate and hidden despair at the moment of the Annunciation, once she becomes aware of her destiny.

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