Claudia Zanaga

I need to see, explore, save, re-elaborate and spread an eternal and universal message: this necessity pushes me to migrate constantly.

Since ever the main attraction and source of inspiration of my creations is “the other”, the other culture, the other tradition, another identity in which I recognize myself every time, due to intimate and constant need to search for a place of belonging. Exploring traditions and symbols help me to reach my intention and to feel part of the “same organism”. I seek stories-symbols of contemporary society and re elaborates them into poetic and symbolic representations, suspended between real and unreal. I prefer traditional techniques that came from my Italian heritage, such as carving and modelling to explore themes of migrations, traditions, identity, metamorphoses. Often anthropomorphised, they become new entities, dreamy and evocative, which thanks to the main use of marble, place themselves in a reality without time and space.

Past and present melt together and characterize my practice that recreate a new aware contemporaneity.

SAILING TO INDIA

Home is a Metaphor for the intimate relationships between that part of the world a person calls “self” and the part of the world called “other” (Jackson 1995)

Metabolizing my journey to India at Last Ship, so many different ideas materialized, in the experimentation of the here and now. I slowly realized that the feeling of familiarity was taking shape in my head and in the studio. I unexpected understood that my impressions were a reflection on how, in defining home, we continue to define ourselves.
In Last Ship I took cultural diversity as a starting point and through encountering and experiencing a “new humanity”, I questioned my certainties. The resulting experiments are nothing but impressions of the intangibles of the everyday. And the certainty that understanding the human is rooted in understanding the other.

I crossed the threshold of the house where hanging textiles, colored by pigments and henna, return the astonishment felt at the sight of prehistoric paintings.

CURTAINS woodblock printing, cotton, pigments, hennè

I meditated, immersing myself in the energy of these temples that exude spirituality and manual labor. They have become bells producing imaginary frequencies, witnesses to a still past that coexists alongside the present of a city that seems to be under constant construction..or destruction.