It is the event through which the archive of the traces of existence is drawn out, exhibited and reactivated with the help of others.
 
Letting things happen simply and fluidly, letting the thoughts flow freely. Staying silent, saying little, working on a mute piece, alone and reservedly, in order to define a collected and contained view of the world. There is a point in which the word has to step back and allow the things to speak just as they are, exactly as they come out. Painting is conceded silence, it is precisely the art of doing something in silence, of saying something in the absence of words. If this is the principle to refer to, how does one take care of it and ensure that this act can always be continued effectively? If this is the nucleus, if it is precisely this that is the essential point that one wants to make emerge, what can one do to highlight it?
I imagined an ideal place where I could cultivate and make all this happen, day after day, planning a space that I have called the ‘Gestureplace’, which is almost metaphysical, absolute, closed in on itself, contained and circumscribed, defined by the measure of my body while it moves and stops first above the ‘Bowl’ to allow the colour to generate and then in front of the surfaces to be painted before imprinting my traces on them. To ensure that the coloured concretions can materialise, I decided to build a sort of stage for a private gesture to make in isolation, and to underline this action I thought that the ritual should be placed on a sort of pedestal. And then I asked myself: where would I put all of this substance produced in the singular concentration? To answer this need, I conceived the ‘Archivers’, which are devices where my emotivity can stay, storage spaces of intimacy in which the need generated by the gesture is set out, structures where the interior reality is contained, as it is, exactly like an objective fact rather than an expressive form.
All of this substance that has been produced rigorously and obsessively, from the brain’s workings, from the psyche and the hand, subsequently needs – through a rhythmic and continuous movement – to be placed in relation to the external world. In order to nourish this condition, it needs to be shared with others in the hope of finding, in these others, some form of interlocution. (The ‘Mindsite’ sprang from this aspiration, together with the need to create a space where the reasoning about my work could flow out, in other words the space on the ‘Maria Morganti: An Archive of Time’ website in which on the one hand I keep the thought about what I do active in a written diary form and on the other I open up to communication, imagining myself more within an epistolary form.)
However, I would now like to go back a little and return to the point where I was describing when the concrete objects made of sedimentations of time and colour were revealed and I would like to try and describe what led me to imagining an ‘Ostension’ towards the outside world.  
If in a certain sense the point in which the interior substance starts to present itself to the real world lies precisely in the construction of the body of the work (Jean-Luc Nancy says: ‘the being of the body, in that it is a body, is exhibited’), the place where it can expand is the exhibition one, in other words somewhere where it is displayed in a public space outside of the studio. What shifts the reasoning in this direction is precisely the desire to visualise the spreading of all this colour to understand the concrete dimension of existence through one’s gaze. Filling one’s eyes with all the accumulated paint to become aware of the time that has past would be an opportunity to understand and to assimilate everything that would otherwise remain closed in the obscurity of the closed box forever.
I would like to plan an exhibition as though it were a house or an intimate setting and make it public. I would like to construct a place where I can let the thought and the substance live, a space capable of embracing the body of the work and at the same time making the meaning clear.
I imagine an action that can be repeated a few times or happen once in a single symbolic occasion, through which everything that has slowly unravelled over the years can be developed within a thickened and concentrated duration.
I see it as an exhibition in two parts that contains two opposing and complementary actions that could be defined with these two verbs: opening and containing, but also with: revealing and concealing. In the first part all the painterly surfaces would be organised one alongside the other in a long chronological and linear sequence obliging the viewer to physically move through the space in order to perceive them in their entirety. In the second part, the same works would return to closing in on themselves inside their containers, becoming small agglomerates visible at a glance. We would ask ourselves: is that all there is of the substance of our life? Is it so little, is it so small? These lumps, these contracted densities would make us see how we are microparticles in a universal constellation relativising our presence.
Let’s move away now from the depiction of interiority and head towards the idea that the private nucleus can be held in the hand by the collective body. If we think of all the accumulation and stratification of the colour over the days not as an autobiographical individual expression but as the spreading of something tangible that spreads its roots in a general substance, then this leaning towards the external should not assume the feeling of an ostentation, of an outpouring of a private self, of an interior spillage, but the exhibition of an objective reality which concerns all of us. What I am trying to say is that when I use expressions such as emotivity, subjectivity, individuality, I think of them not in an intimist sense, but in a paradigmatic way, considering that each of us can only start from ourselves, placing ourselves on common ground in order to reach the communication with others so greatly aspired to.
And it is precisely in order to direct myself towards this aspiration that I am pushing in the direction of this depiction: from the individual rite of the formation of the painterly substance to the collective one of its exhibition, in a sort of happening, an unsolemn ceremonial, slowly, gradually all the individual coloured elements, the ‘Diaries’, the ‘Infinite Painting’ and the ‘Sedimentations’ would radiate, taking their position in the space guided by bodies of different people.
I see the ‘Gestureplace’ with its ‘Archivers’ being placed at the centre of a very large space to help people perceive how a single life is so small in relation to the space of the world, to say that alongside there would also be the empty space for many other existences, to affirm that this particular existence would not be the only one, but, only in that precise moment, would stand out to represent all the others in its specific singularity.
If it is true that I myself am the first observer of this materialisation of the substance, the act of taking it out of the silence to extend it to the gaze of others is what makes it active and open to all the possible new revitalisations. If the formation of the word-colour happens as I have written, in total solitude, the ‘Ostension’ could only happen together, with and among others. If all that has happened in the total concentration of isolation is like being engrossed in just one moment before determining any definite conformation, it is only during the exhibition that one manages to finally fashion a possible completeness.
I have merely traced a few starting points. I will stop here. I do not want to add anything else about what effective form all of this can take. Not wanting to be alone in determining the things, I ask other individuals to get involved in my process, disrupting my uniqueness as the creator. At this point, I would like the imagination and thoughts of the people around me to enter in order to help me visualise how all of this mass of colour can first be expanded and then closed again through a sort of collective rituality that allows everyone to enter it, to feel a part of it, and to participate in it. 
 
(Written in 2021)