Anna Meschiari

Musée départemental du Textile, Labastide-Rouairoux

DRESSING, Blauer Montag, Toulouse, 2021 – solo show, curator : Stefania Meazza

Installation in public space, Viterbe, Tarn, France, October 2020

Residency AFIAC "Revenir au monde", 12 - 23 October 2020 – curator : Antoine Marchand

Two pillars of the Asilo Sant'Elia wrapped by one meter high clear sheet.

Laboratorio Aperto, XXIV CSAV - Artist Research Laboratory, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Asilo Sant'Elia, Como.

In the continuity of my preoccupations around alterity, I have conceived a capsule as a device ready to be sent into space, to meet possible beings from elsewhere.

The "Pages Blanches" book n° 11, in its unaltered version, has been encapsulated and welded in stainless, waiting to come into contact with another environment. Only the photographs taken during the welding process testify of the existence of the book in its capsule. "Pages Blanches" thus becomes a double projection medium giving space to the probable beings from elsewhere to discover this object and to appropriate it in their own way. Will they only have the idea of forcing the opening, or will they just observe it or will they perhaps make a ready-made alien version?

 © Paul Hyde

Solo show at PAC Aussillon, 12/01 - 16/03/2018 – curator : Françoise-Aline Blain

As would an entomologist, the photographer Anna Meschiari has been working hard to find rare specimens to fill her drawers. She selects and collects iconographical material in an almost encyclopeadic manner, in an attempt to master the multiplicity of meanings and representations of a word. Her collection grows out of books, archives of libraries and museums sources, but also comes from the infinite database of the web. Elsewhere, the Other, these words which resonate in our imagination as much as in the research geared towards to the exploration of distant and parallel times and territories. Science and fiction call up, nourish and meet each other in the scientific imagination whose medias are particularly fit for our projections, fantasies and desires to understand the unknown. The presence of an elsewhere remains for us intangible in space and time. Though no trace is left, these apparitions give way to a profusion of testimonies, attempts to describe UFOs, confidential files about alien life or Hollywood movies which seem to join sometimes in this grey zone between fiction and reality. The material of Anna Meschiari is inexhaustible and malleable. Whether visual or literary, illustration, newspaper clipping, or evidences, she takes possession of it for her own investigative artistic practice. Her study is guided by the relations between images and words, the representation and its legend. Through manipulation and misuse of these extracts of information and of these stereotypes, she attempts to sketch out this absence, its invented traces and most importantly our relation to unknown. (Marie DuPasquier / DISPLAY, Berlin)

with the kind support of Kosmos Kultur Stiftung - Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council - Repubblica e Canton Ticino, SWISSLOS - Mulhouse Biennial of Photography - DISPLAY, Berlin - Green Hill Gallery, Berlin

"Atlas is the name of the well known Titan that carried the heaven on his shoulders.

It is also the name of the vertebra that supports the skull, one of the craters of the Moon, a satellite of Saturn, the largest butterfly of the world, a bodybuilder, a pizza, a condom, a car radio, a chain of mountains, of the well known work of Gerhard Richter,…

Things and beings, places and works of art, by the name of Atlas through the world are countless – and more the images representing it circulating on the Internet. Some have retain me. A collection took shape. But what to a such a profusion? Titanic task… as infinite.

My approach is that of an iconographer, archivist and collector, looking for a possible reading of the world through the multitude of images today to our scope. The realization, by printing, of the images known until that point as virtual one, changed their status. The materialized images reappropriated, acquires a new life. The reappropriation of the images (their processing, their arrangement) allows to resemble the one to the other and gives them lines, a common form, an air of family.

An ephemeral display, as grid, reflects the creative process. It represents how the image collection was made and witnessed. It evokes the navigation on the ocean of web. The time dimension gives here the temporal extent of this undertaking. Appalling to the proportions of the Internet, at its disproportionate memory, an answer emerges, that of access to human scale, the story of an individual.

The exposed images interact with each other, in a narrative that is reminiscent, in a wink, to the Mnemosyne Atlas of Aby Warburg. If the display suggests the collection, a set of books, as extension, allows a neat picked, personal and singular. Atlas gives its name to many things through the World that the latter, in its broad widths, appears everywhere affected by this appellation. Therefore, the impression of universality closes this project to a imaginary mapping, or an atlas (or parody?) and raises the question of global sharing images.

Atlas can contemplate the vault that he carries – a possible constellation, subjective, among many others."