Amina Amici embodies Mary’s bewilderment, doubts, nightmares and pain through broken movements, searching for lines, forms and expressions able to portray her solitary search for meaning. The restless sequence of disturbed sleep is remarkable: Amina-as-Mary desperately and vainly seeks a position that might restore to her the peace of innocence. The performer’s gaze is profoundly expressive and eloquent. Francesca Maria Rizzotti | KLP

And what of me? I, who am flesh, heart and congealed breath? I? Who am nails and teeth and skin, turning into onion steeped in vinegar and wasted away? 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 perspective, in a twofold inquiry: into femininity and into choreographic writing sparked by pictorial and iconographic studies and suggestions.

The work asks what Mary might have thought in her most intimate self, what she might have felt in the wake of such extraordinary events, and ultimately how all this may have been inscribed in her body.

The movement of a painting; a fragment of space and time containing Mary’s most intimate thoughts—those of a young woman in relation to the extraordinary events of her life. The selected artists and paintings therefore contribute to the composition and dynamics of movement. The rhythm of gesture brings “action” to the potential held within the two-dimensional surface of painting. Vanishing points, just like a line softening in order to receive, become punctuation marks in the choreographic writing.

What was her emotional state? What were her gaze and her heart like, racing—perhaps with fear—at the encounter with the Archangel? A place, a non-place, on the threshold between abstraction and concreteness. Mary as intermediary between the earthly and the divine; seen from the perspective of the woman and mother, of the archetype, of an ordinary and mortal woman.

What remains of Mary, despite us?