Stratigrafie del vivente

The Italian-Brazilian artist Giulia Mangoni (Isola del Liri, 1991) develops a body of research that intersects painting, memory, and territorial belonging. Conceived as a layered journey through practices, imaginaries, and ontologies of the living, this first museum monograph unfolds across the entire museum as a sequence of environments in which different systems — artisanal, symbolic, natural, and industrial — emerge as interdependent strata of a single, complex reality. Rather than organizing themes, the project constructs an apparatus in which images, materials, and relationships settle and transform over time, activating a reading of the present as a field crossed by tensions and continuities.

Giulia Mangoni’s painting does not simply represent landscape, nor does it narrate a territory or document a cultural geography. Rather, it destabilizes the very idea of landscape as an observable surface, restoring to the visible its stratified, ambiguous, processual nature. Each work presents itself as a form of emergence: something surfaces, but what emerges always carries with it the pressure of what remains submerged. It is from this tension that Stratigraphies of the Living arises — an exhibition that does not simply aim to order a body of work, but to make legible its deeper method: a way of relating to reality grounded in listening, permanence, and sedimentation, while also cultivating a dialogue with works from the Museum’s permanent collection.

Stratigraphies of the Living adopts a “geological” conception of experience, in which different temporal levels coexist and mutually influence one another, evoking a vision of the world as a process in continual becoming. The exhibition thus offers a reflection on the living, understood not as a collection of separate elements, but as a complex network of relationships traversed by memories, survivals, and transformations.

Painting thus becomes an active surface of translation: a site where gestures, knowledge, and narratives are reworked, transposed, and at times misaligned, giving shape to new visual configurations. Rather than representing the world, Mangoni’s work interrogates its very conditions of possibility, insisting on the need to rethink the relationship between the human, the animal, the vegetal, and the symbolic.

Religious iconographies, reread through a contemporary sensibility, intertwine with material culture and with the ritual dimension of landscape, generating a hybrid vocabulary in which the sacred emerges as a latent and persistent form. In this shift, the image becomes a site of survival and metamorphosis, where past and present coexist in a simultaneity without hierarchy.

Stefano Raimondi