At the Stefania Miscetti Studio, “The Meatseller”, the exhibition that brings together Margherita Giusti’s animation and the selection of acrylics that were part of the production, is an incredible journey through a story of female emancipation This is the life story of Selinna Ajamikoko, whom Giusti met in 2022 thanks to Margherita D’Andrea, a social worker at SPRAR in Rome, an organisation set up to protect asylum seekers and refugees.
Seventeen minutes to literally transport us into another dimension with the magic of a story that unfolds through a series of metamorphic transformations that start from the woman’s body, but also the one sacrificed for her emancipation and survival, until it becomes a single body.
So much is recounted in this transformation and in a very small span of time. Important and sometimes violent moments unfold with great lightness and poetry using every possible aspect of animation, alternating analogue and digital techniques. The animation itself seems to have come out of the author’s gut after taking the right steps. The first phase of the elaboration of the story with the series of meetings with Selinna Ajamikoko throughout the 2022 animation was gradually metabolised to be then and returned in a poetic form. A transformation within the transformation that in the animation has sealed a symbiosis of those who tell and those who listen to arrive at the sublimation of the primordial energy’ that pushes towards the future.
Emerging from this moment of estrangement from space and time, traces of that magic are visible in the 20 acrylics, original frames used for the animation out of the 900 produced to complete the work, positioned on the side walls of the gallery that accompany the central space dedicated to the projection of the animation. Each drawing is a moment that in itself contains all the viscerality and passion of the experience, the story, its listening and its transformation released from paper into the flow of images and accompanying sound.
The focus on Margherita Giusti’s work follows her participation in “She Devil”, the yearly review of video work promoted by Stefania Miscetti in Rome and organised by a collective of curators, which since 2006 has never stopped following current events, which has travelled to various museums and institutions around the world and will soon open its new edition in the gallery spaces.
Margherita Giusti presented her short film Innatura (2021) as the opening work of the 12th edition of SHE DEVIL at the MAXXI Museum in 2021. Innatura was subsequently screened at Studio Miscetti in 2022, followed by a presentation at the international biennial BIENALSUR in 2023.
Now Giusti is back with a film that in her intentions was supposed to express ‘that primordial, animal energy that shakes things up, that allows us to rise from the ashes and look to the future with curiosity, as part of the continuous discovery of the world that continues with every step we take’. Not only did it succeed but it taught a great lesson in the use and combination of techniques, technologies, and teamwork. An important part was in fact the collaboration with Emanele Bonomi, with whom she spent more than a year conducting interviews, writing the screenplay, creating the storyboard and editing the film, Elisa Bonandin, Elisabetta Bosco, Viola Mancini (from the animation collective MUTA) who worked on the pre-production, and with Enrico Ascoli who combined original soundtrack and sound design with Selinna’s first-person narration.
Margherita Giusti. The Meatseller, Stefania Miscetti Gallery, Rome, until March 2nd, 2024
The film was produced by Luca Guadagnino’s Frenesy Film Company and presented at the Venice Film Festival 2023 in the Orizzonti category.
images: Margherita Giusti, «The Meatseller», 2023, frame from film, Courtesy of the Artist
