Maria Ginzburg - Memories of the Dust

Maria Ginzburg - Memories of the Dust Accordion Book The project is dedicated to the Apuan Alps and to all those landscapes which, for trivial reasons linked to profit-making purposes of private individuals, are in danger of disappearing. The intent is to highlight the problems generated by a system that compromises the complex balance of nature, of these mountains victims of mass production. The exhibition also highlights the passive acceptance by the community, of permanent damage to this collective heritage, which took millennia for its formation and which it will no longer be possible to recover future. The underlying theme of the work is the latent memory of calcium carbonate, the material that forms marble and yes presented as a powder, the genesis of which dates back to a life cycle and a thousand-year history of transformation and continuous structural modification, which leads to the creation of mountain ranges. In the contemporary world, this material, obtained by transforming extracted marble blocks into powder from the mountain, has recently gone from waste residue to speculation, now used for industrial whitening processes, involving products such as paper or toothpaste. The leporello presented at the exhibition, with the aim of narrating the duplicity of the path of this material, presents two different reading verses, which allow you to read the work both from right to left, and vice versa. This is to narrate, on the one hand, the very slow pace of the millennial natural evolutionary history of marble, with the complexity that guaranteed its formation, both to describe the destructive work of the human being and the speed with which the extraction processes irreparably and fatally affect the landscape. The visible contrast between the two sides shows the long-term consequences of harmful and selfish behaviors of man, offering a starting point for an ethical reflection and self-responsibility on the issues of pollution, offering an alternative perspective. A perspective in which education for environmental sustainability becomes an essential core to provide coordinates that can lead to more informed choices in everyday life, through the construction of a active and participatory critical awareness. The cultural investment allows a real emancipation from the logic of profit and enslavement, in which harmful consumer dynamics generate waste and an aggressive lifestyle towards the planet. All this leads to reflections on the possibility of creating a new way of understanding the collective and private space, in the light of alternative solutions that guarantee real well-being, which can be expressed through respectful and harmonious coexistence of man with the surrounding space, where well-being is not expressed solely in hedonistic attitudes, but in the real and tangible improvement of the quality of life. The meaning of our existence on the planet is found in the indispensability of empathy, of cooperation. In a point of view overall it is clear that the ethical sense of our daily life can only be acquired recognizing oneself in the different, be it the natural world of vegetation and animals, or man himself. In conclusion, the path traced in the pages of "memories of the dust" wants to affirm the link indissoluble bond that binds man to the surrounding environment, starting from the analysis of the processes of creation of life, and highlighting how much the loss of the ultimate meaning of living is the primary cause of inner malaise of the planet.

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