STELLA MARIS

2017 - 2019

Rachele Maistrello uses the landscape surrounding a nursing home to give shape to the imagination and perceptions of the guests who lived there, trying to eliminate any element attributable to the physical and mental deprivation consumate with their years. Stella Maris is a structure for the elderly who are no longer self-sufficient that is situated between a strip of land separating the Adriatic Sea from the Venetian lagoon. The artist, after collecting a series of audio, written, and video interviews during her long stay at Stella Maris, picked up pieces of bark from the hospital park trees and transformed them into abstract portraits. The collected shapes are transformed into photographic silhouettes of the waters that are daily seen from the guests’ windows. Once the photographic silhouettes were made, she studied the tides and reaections of the lights in the lagoon’s landscape and installed the silhouettes in the water, photographing them again through a view camera. The various explorations and constructions of the pictures were filmed and displayed daily to guests in their rooms. In the second phase of the project, the artist, along with three residents of the structure, Giulio, Annamaria and Nerina, decided to build a map of their imaginations, letting them draw and cataloging a sign-atlas of their memories and their daily thoughts. Part of these drawings were transformed into vector images, which were engraved with laser cutting on stainless steel. The artist’s book, a compilation of stories, drawings, and photographs by the guests of the views from the nursing home are made on a special transparent paper, the same paper the residents used for drawings during the months of the artist’s presence in the hospital.

“I am interested in the time within time, like the invisible bubbles which are space-time portals. I think about how we normally talk about old people: kitchens full of knick-knacks, colourful pot-holders, close-ups of hands marked by the years, voices trembling as they talk about the war. This is what I want to avoid: I would like to arrive at a pure, distilled version, which frees itself from one imaginary world to reach another.”
Stella Maris, A retrospective diary, 2018