Virginia Zanetti. I just want to know who I am

The exhibition by Virginia Zanetti shows videos and photographs of the performance created by the artist involving the trampoline team from the Etruria 1897 gymnastics club in Prato and the athlete from the Italian trampolining team, Chiara Cecchi. Continuing the research already begun by the artist in her previous project, “I Pilastri della Terra”, I Just Want to Know Who I Am has an autobiographical focus that concentrates on the concept of overcoming individual limits and the need for renewal and freedom.

The image of a person falling through the air from the perspective of the ground comes from a photo of Luigi Zanetti (silver medal-winning gymnast at the London Olympics in 1948) doing a somersault. Upside down, the image gives the illusion of a person falling from the earth, evoking the vulnerability of the human condition. This human being, alone and falling, results from the solitude and sense of powerlessness in the face of the pandemic, as we found ourselves in an empty space that allowed us to perceive our fragility and impermanence on one hand, and the need for a drastic renewal and extreme sense of freedom on the other. By hypothesizing that life develops through cyclical phases of origin, growth, degeneration, death and rebirth, both at the individual and collective level and in the cycle of nature, this installation investigates our need to disintegrate to then rebuild ourselves.

Virginia Zanetti, artist and teacher, lives in Prato. Graduating in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, she specialized in teaching art. She works both in non-conventional places and in Italian and foreign contemporary art and cultural institutions, including MAN in Nuoro, CCC Strozzina in Florence, CAC Pecci in Prato and MAC in Lissone in Italy; the Kunsthalle in Bern and the Institute of Italian Culture in New Delhi and Zurich. Her works can be found in public collections, such as MADRE in Naples and MAMBO in Bologna. She is co-founder of Estuario Project Space in Prato and Laboratorio del Futuro, a debating platform where intellectuals meet and discuss topics concerning the contemporary world with the public.