Silvia Vendramel

HABITUS

Habitus è un’opera composta dalla sovrapposizione di dita di sotto-guanti in cotone che i cavatori utilizzano nell’estrazione del marmo.

Inserendo strato dopo strato, un dito dentro l’altro, il guanto perde la sua identità per trasformarsi, nella moltitudine, in un luogo/nido, un’amalgama di potenziali abitacoli dove l’idea di corpo diventa spazio di accoglienza, stratifcazione, nascondiglio.

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Habitus is a work composed of overlapping cotton work gloves.

Drawing from cotton’s tactile and visual qualities, it brings out a sense of warmth and protection. Inserting one finger into another, layer after layer, the object “glove” loses its original identity to become—in its multiplicity—a nest, an amalgam of potential dwelling places in which the idea of body becomes a space of welcome, a place, a hideaway.

Habitus preserves in itself a sense of community, the archaic, and the natural, all at the same time.

I lived for some fifteen years in Carrara, the home of marble quarrying, where the battle for better work conditions offered fertile terrain for the Anarchist movement that marked its history.

The gloves used in this work are, in fact, the under-gloves quarrymen wear. Attracted by both the symbolic value of these garments and the delicate chromatic variations of the cotton weave, I intended to elaborate on the theme of production in a work that keeps disjointed elements close together and evokes the property of generating heat through contact with skin.