Anna Maria Maiolino: amongst lives, throughout life

Abstract

Entrevidas (1981) is a photographic tryptic belonging to Anna Maria Maiolino’s Fotopoemação (Photopoemaction) series. It records a performance where the artist walks across cobblestones onto which raw eggs have been laid out and interspersed. The care and attention demanded so as not to tread on any is subtly suggested by the delicate steps of the figure. Each photograph depicts approximately the same space and, when placed side-by-side, the assembled images record the movement of a body across space and over time. Beyond this undeniable cinematic quality, in this essay I would like to elaborate upon the work’s relations to time in a broader sense, namely: its relation to its own time, to the artist’s lifetime and how these become entangled within the time of art history. The essay was published in a catalog edited by the MAXXI museum, in Rome, as a result of the exhibition Senzamargine Passages in Italian Art at the Turn of the Millennium, held in 2020 at the aforementioned Italian museum.