MAGNIFICAT

“And me? I who am flesh, heart and congealed breath? Me? I who am nails and teeth and skin dissolving like an onion in scattered vinegar? Me, 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, within a dual investigation: one centred on the feminine, the other on choreographic writing shaped through painterly and iconographic studies and inspirations.

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

The movement of a painting becomes a fragment of space-time belonging to Mary’s most intimate thoughts — the thoughts of a young woman confronting the extraordinary events of her life. The selected artists and paintings thus contribute directly to the writing and dynamics of movement. The rhythm of gesture gives “action” to the potential enclosed within the two-dimensionality of painting. Vanishing points, as well as lines that soften in order to welcome, become punctuation marks within the choreographic score.

What was her emotional state? What was the nature of her gaze, of her beating heart in the speed of fear, perhaps, at the encounter with the Archangel?

A place — and a non-place — suspended on the threshold between abstraction and concreteness. Mary as mediator between the earthly and the divine; the perspective of the woman, the mother, the archetype — a common and mortal woman.

What remains of Mary despite us?