MAGNIFICAT

And what about me?

I who am flesh, heart, and held breath?

I?

I who am nails and teeth and skin, transforming—like an onion steeped in vinegar—dissipated?

I, who carried you like a tattoo, like a wrinkle?

Bruno de Franceschi

In Magnificat, Amina Amici continues her exploration of the figure of the Virgin Mary through a secular gaze, pursuing a dual line of research: an inquiry into the feminine and an investigation of choreographic writing rooted in pictorial and iconographic studies and inspirations.

The work asks what Mary might have thought in her most intimate moments, what she may have felt in the wake of such extraordinary life events, and how all of this might have been inscribed in her body. The movement becomes that of a painting—a fragment of space-time shaped by Mary’s most private thoughts, by the inner life of a young woman confronted with the exceptional circumstances of her existence. The selected artists and artworks thus actively contribute to the choreographic writing and to the dynamics of movement.

The rhythm of gesture gives action to the potential contained within pictorial bidimensionality. Vanishing points, as well as lines that soften in order to receive, become punctuation marks within the choreographic score.

What was her emotional state? What was the quality of her gaze, the rhythm of her beating heart in the speed of fear—perhaps—at the moment of encountering the Archangel? A place, a non-place, poised on the threshold between abstraction and concreteness. Mary as a mediator between the earthly and the divine; the perspective of the woman and the mother, of the archetype and of a common, mortal woman.

What remains of Mary, despite us?