Memories From Transitioning
Memories From Transitioning is a visual project that intimately explores the artist’s journey through the gender affirming process, experienced as a transgender girl living in southern Italy.
The aim of the project is to collocate trans representation in a complex visual imaginary supporting a central reflection on temporality. Visual standards and narrative codes are dislocated by tracing an emotional and metaphorical diary of “transitioning”, intended as a movement through space, time and gender spectrum.
The artist’s personal story is told by rewriting crucial experiences, processes and sensations such as birth, joy, anger, adolescence and solitude. By sublimating the story the chance to easily connect the images to a specific identity or body is not given to the spectator but a livable visual dimension that acts as a place for solidarity and emotional contamination is created.
The artist’s body is shown in its spectrality and potentiality acting as a bridge through space, time and gender stereotypes: a vital body that changes shape and constantly re-signifies itself, that is tangible but also conceptual.
Grace Martella (b. 2006, Tiggiano, Italy) is an Italian artist whose practice explores identity, temporality and the relationship between landscape and the transgender experience. She began using photography at the age of thirteen as a way of reflecting on everyday life through personal experience. Her work brings together intimate narratives and political awareness, developing new visual languages for representing trans identity. She was shortlisted for the Premio Luigi Ghirri and the Pini Prize, and her work has been exhibited at Fotografia Europea, Fondazione Sandretto and Galleria Viasaterna.