Grazia Toderi: Light, Photography, Body

Abstract

The essay will focus on the complex relationship Grazia Toderi (Padua, 1963) has established with the photographic medium over time. Prominent in her formative years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, this relationship, although changed, has survived even when Toderi’s production focused mainly on video and immersive light installations. The suspended atmospheres of the first photographs were soon replaced by video recorded with a fixed camera in which minimal movements and ephemeral gestures become the protagonists, followed by projections in which terrestrial and celestial cartographies merge. According to this perspective and with reference to unpublished archival material, the essay will investigate the artist’s first exhibitions, in a period spanning from her participation in the Aperto ’93 section of the Venice Biennale to the personal show set up in 1998 at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea. The essay will provide crucial insights into: the relationship between the private and public spheres in the artist’s photographic and video practices; the presence of autobiographical elements and their mixing with references drawn from high and popular culture; the use of the body and language; the work of art as a field of confrontation/encounter among opposite energies; the critical reception of Toderi’s exhibition activity during the nineties.