In 2013 Raffaela Mariniello (Naples, 1961) produced a photographic series about Bagnoli and the video Still in Life, 2014, donated by the artist to the museum’s collection, which takes visual form and content from the ashes of the Città della Scienza complex, destroyed by arson on the night of March 4, 2013. The video gradually patrols, dwelling on surreal details of twisted forms that still bear the imprint of their original function or conformation, the ruins of the great cultural complex and center of aggregation of an entire community, affirming, through camera movements as sinuous as they are rigorous and slow, reflective editing, a process of sublimation with respect to the context of destruction. Expressive choices understood as a creative and aesthetic gesture of redemption and invocation of a possibility of rebirth.
With her 1986 solo exhibition at Villa Pignatelli in Naples, Raffaela Mariniello directs her research toward social and cultural themes, for which the black-and-white landscape becomes the expressive signature. The cycle Bagnoli, una fabbrica (Bagnoli, a factory) dates back to 1991, where industrial landscapes at sunset, filtered by artificial lights through chemical soot, bring out a dimension of unreal suspension between the natural and the artifactual.
In 1995 she exhibited Moltitudini at Studio Trisorio and, in 1998, Natura morta: in these installations the artist juxtaposes the specific reference to photographic technique with openings to other languages, announcing a detachment from traditional photography. In 2001 she presented at Castel Nuovo in Naples the cycle Napoli veduta immaginaria, urban views, taken at dusk, in which she mixes the cityscape with the nature that intercalates with it, to the point of contradicting it. With long exposure times, the photographs render metaphysical places, often marked by the presence of reflecting waters, which increase their icy, leaden hue, in which the artist, through the use of flash, tends to erase some details in order to enhance or evoke others.
On the occasion of Daniel Buren’s in situ work for the Arin in Ponticelli, promoted by the Incontri Internazionali d’Arte, Mariniello produced a photographic catalogue in 2004 that captures the French artist’s intervention, while 2005 saw the work on the city of Cardiff, which she exhibited in Wales along with photographs of other Mediterranean cities: dilapidated port areas and urban agglomerations in which the artist contrasts foreground with background, light with darkness, nature with industry, movement with stasis. With the video installation Over and Over, presented in 2005 at Studio Trisorio, Mariniello deepens the combination of photographic and video language, without narrative intentions, but aimed at developing a research in which the photographic image becomes a photogram, which slows down the flow of time by curbing the dynamism imposed by video. From 2006 to 2011 she worked on Souvenirs d’Italie, a series of color postcards, made in Italian squares, cities of art or picturesque places, from which magnificent contradictions of the playful, childlike, luminescent dimension of contemporaneity emerge.
From the text by Olga Scotto di Vettimo
