Entrevidas (Between Lives), 1981 - 2010

Anna Maria Maiolino’s art emerges from a close connection with her personal biography. Born in southern Italy, at the age of twelve she emigrated with her family to Venezuela. As she recalls, this early experience of being uprooted from her native land played a decisive role in her subsequent path: “I lost the idea of logic, the need to be consistent, to follow an orthodoxy. I gained my freedom.” And she adds: “Working as an artist allowed me to place my feelings in the world... And to transform this ‘lack’ into a compensation through a constant process of elaboration of signs and metaphors... For me, to form myself as a person, to learn to be in the world with its nastiness and beauty, was also a way of forming myself as an artist. The difficulties of an uncomfortable existence in a foreign land, including the daily need to relate to a still-incomprehensible language, weigh profoundly on her memory of those years. [...]