Sara Maino

Castello or Porta#

Artist’s Statement#

Technique: acrylic, papyrus, earth, and larch powder, 100cm x 70cm unframed.

When you enter the forest, you do not see it. But you still can feel the presence of imaginary walls, towers and doors of the fortification, today swallowed and hidden by trees.

Over the hill that dominates Bolognano d’Arco, in Alto Garda Trentino area, where I live, there was once a medieval castle belonging to The Sejano’s family.

This castle was completely destroyed by another powerful family, the Counts of Arco, during a terrible battle in the mid-thirteenth century. The memory of it goes up till nowadays.

That’s why one day, returning from a walk in the woods, I tried to impress on paper the feeling of that place: therefore I used recycled papyrus, covered with earth and wood power of dead trees, collected in place.

I wanted to give the idea of a door, hidden and secret, as the threshold of a memory which cannot be exactly reconstructed, but it can give the impression of a violent storm.

About the Artist#

Sara Maino is an Italian audio-visual artist, author, poet and film and theatre director.

She was the winner of the 2011 Lucca Video for the artistic short cuoredilago, Best Photography for short film and trailers at Festival RNAB in Brazil, shortlisted at the Nartugan festival in Turkey, and received an honourable mention at Festival del cinema di Cefalù in Sicily in 2022. She exhibited her documentary film Generazione di sogni in the exhibition Nothing To Sell 2019 at the Rome Macro museum.

Together with Marina Kazakova, she is half of a poetry stage duo performing in Groningen, Sofia, Mani Lit Fest 2021 in Greece, Lithuania, the 34th Gerard Manley Hopkins International Literary Festival 2022 in Ireland, and Poetry On the Lake 2022 in Italy.

She attends the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Trento.