Artist
Serena Perrone

Project Title
Smarrimento/Apparizione

Grant Amount
$3,000
Antinori Visual Artist Grant

Website
https://serenaperrone.com

Smarrimento documents the discovery of a child’s dress in the ruins of an abandoned church in the artist's hometown in Sicily, and the narrative she constructs in an effort to imagine how the dress came to be there. This finding reinforced her perception of subtle signs of surveillance and control and the legacy of family honor, intimidation, violence, the post-war tensions between fascism and communism, and histories that intertwine her own. Smarrimento means many things, including loss and bewilderment. This research led to the next component, Apparizione: hand-made maiolica tiles featuring a pattern inspired by the dress fabric, installed on-site, serving a two-fold purpose - recalling the dress and its unknown owner, and recalling the maiolica tiles that once covered the floor of the church, underscoring the legacy of silence around femicide and domestic violence, and the desecration of historic abandoned sites throughout the depopulating villages of Italy. Funding from Idea Capital will permit her to realize this ongoing project as a series of prints, large-scale photographic scrims and installations of maiolica tiles to be exhibited in venues in the United States and in Italy, pushing her thematic artistic research into the expanded field of prints, photographs, multiples, and installation.