The personal element is fundamental to her work: this, together with universally recognized themes, is one of the various research fields of her artistic production. One of the most important among these is certainly the case of body, which is at the same time fertile research field and active tool to develop different projects: in “La viola e un poco nervosamente” (2010), the body of the artist abandons its social identity representation to play the role of a musical instrument: Silvia disappears, the artist disappears and gets replaced by an object which has a specific function, that is playing music. In this performance the heartbeat rhythm becomes the arrangement for an improvised melody underlining how our society gets actually influenced by the context where things appear and by labels they get. Silvia Giambrone shows us that a half-naked body is not necessarily an object of desire, something which is instead always maintained by today’s media bombing of images.
Following this, the performance “Eredità” (2008) is based on the analysis of seduction techniques and especially on the everyday habit of make-up: the artist attaches fake metal eyelashes on her eyes, symbols of the cosmetic habits to which women are forced from time immemorial because of the cultural legacy imposing on them to be pleasant to men’s eyes.
Silvia Giambrone’s body is then the target of a laser which is drawn on her naked skin in “Sotto tiro” (2013): the artist is subject of an unknown and unmotivated threat, that is the actual being within reach of a laser which turns her into a convicted victim. Such intrusive light signal might also represent the harassing gaze which is impossible to escape from and which violates personal intimacy causing discomfort.
“Teatro anatomico” (2012) is a performance presented on the occasion of the collective exhibition “Re-generation”: an embroidered collar is sewed on the artist’s neck. The brutality of the needle piercing her flesh contrasts with the simplicity of the artist’s reaction: she shows off her collar as an accessory which at the end of the performance has made her more beautiful, pleasant and feminine. This performance conveys a strongly symbolic message: the collar represents both religious and political authority (priests’ white collars, but even more the collars of those well-pressed shirts underneath powerful men’s coats), as well as rigor, recalling girls’ school uniforms and smocks. The fact that the collar is being sewed by hand inevitably refers back to feminist artistic production and culture, as well as to Italian women’s past condition which regarded to sewing as one of the few activities allowed.
Silvia Giambrone appropriates this technique and one of the first works where she employs it is “Il Pizzo” (2012): tiny fragments of blue lace cover the faces of female figures in her parents’ wedding pictures. Lace turns into a mask which hides these women’s identity: on the one hand, times has now changed them so much that they cannot even recognize themselves in those pictures anymore, on the other hand, this also implies the paradoxical possibility of preserving them from fading paper, which will make them completely disappear. Also, the artist leaves only the faces of male attendants in order to better underline how the theme of female beauty is again indelibly tied to the dictates of male culture.
Lace as the proof of an old female tradition tied to Southern Italy and to those female ancestors who spent their time sewing: these are the key concepts of the work “Made in Italy”. Our country is still strongly anchored to its past and this cultural weight, which is both a dead weight and a treasure to pass on posterity, is represented by a plaster block with stamped molds of collars. Giambrone’s “Made in Italy” is a mirror of nowadays society which once again portrays women in a condition dependent on men.
However, sewing is not useful to only create pretty and decorative clothes ornaments: proof of this is “Eroina” (2012), the hooked reproduction of the molecular structure of heroin. There is both a strong contrast between the concept of crochet hook itself and the final result, as well as a subtle meaning game around the title of the work: heroin, indeed, might be associated both with the drug and a powerful female figure come to rescue society.
One of her favorite communications media is writing. Language is the tool which allows Silvia Giambrone to create her “Autoritratto – Io nel settembre 2009 all’altezza di un universo senza risposte” (2010), where everything revolves around the concept of subtraction: there is, indeed, physical subtraction when she gets rid of all the letters which make up the title of the work from moving sheets with the letters of the alphabet. Inspiration for this piece comes from Carla Lonzi’s “Sputiamo su Hegel” which deals with the theme of the actual possibility for the subject to exist regardless of the dialectic condition which defines him, that is out of a definite context where he exists unwillingly.
Words meet the body in “Translation” (2009), a performance which investigates the relationship between language and reality: the language we speak is considered just like Law, a code which defines everything; however, someone’s hands simultaneously writing the same sentence in different languages help showing the illusion of the idea that there exists a correspondence between words and real objects. In the same way, the commandment “You shall have no other gods before me” is translated into another language and simultaneously written in two different ways by the same person, showing how the concept present in those words gets actually betrayed.
Attention to words is found also in “No Enemy” (2008), an installation with big and heavy wooden letters covered with lead which invade the foyer space of the third level of MART in Rovereto. The absence of space between the words “no” and “enemy” initially confuses the beholder who hardly understands the meaning of those words. Once again the artist unmasks the ambiguousness of language and the meanings attached to it.

Silvia Giambrone has been collaborating with various galleries: Il ponte contemporanea, Roma; Galleria Bonomo, Bari; Galleria Deanesi, Rovereto; Galleria Biagiotti, Firenze and starting from 2012 Galleria Doppelgaenger, Bari.

She has recently won the Main Prize at Kaunas Biennial.

Among her personal exhibitions: L’impero libero degli schiavi, Galleria Doppelgaenger, Bari (2012); Parallel Borders, Roma, curated by Mark Mangion (2012); Sotto falso nome, Fondazione Spazio13, Warsaw (2011); Fuori di me, Spazio Ferramenta, Torino, curated by Susanna Sara Mandice (2011); Invito all’opera, Galleria Il ponte contemporanea, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva (2010); More to come, Upload Art Project, curated by Silvia Conta, Federico Mazzonelli, Julia Trolp (2010); Speaking your language I learnt how to hate you, Galleria NextDoor, Roma, curated by L. Benedetti (2008).

Among her main collectives, the most recent ones are: KAUNAS BIENNAL UNITEXT ’13, National Museum of M. K. Čiurlionis (20013); Refuse, Ex Mattatoio di Testaccio, La Pelanda, Roma, curated by Roberto D’Onorio (2013); SUBJECTIVE MAPS/ DISAPPEARENCES, Parallel Borders 1 / Monuments & Shrines to Capitalism curated by Mark Mangion for Malta Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Iceland (2013); MEDITERRANEA 16, Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean (BJCEM), Ancona (2013); Autoritratti. Iscrizioni del femminile nell’arte italiana contemporanea, MAMbo, curted by Uliana Zanetti, Bologna (2013); Vetrinale, Roma, curated by Cecilia Casorati, Micol di Veroli e Yuri Elena (2012); Re-Generation, MACRO Testaccio, Roma, curated by Maria Alicata e Ilaria Gianni (2012).

www.silviagiambrone.com

«The main question I was asking to myself was how poetry could resist and live today, what possible developments it might go through, its metamorphoses; art and especially the avant-gardes had already dealt with this issue with brilliant, futuristic and charming solutions. Many of the protagonists of that unique season were originally poets and men of letters (Breton, Marinetti, Tzara, just to mention a few), who later applied their own poetics to life itself and shared it with the outside world, making their poetry alive and flooding it with innovative points of view. From here, it seemed natural to me dealing with life and action and involving that portion of contemporary theatre which was interested in installation and performance.”

Although every work portrays dynamics which are constantly tied to the wills of an always different “tyrannical present,” it is with space that Domenico manages to merge the various demands of his work into a univocal dimension which gives life to it.

And it is exactly in a well-defined space – such as those spaces offered by Morra Foundation in the 18^th century Palazzo Bagnara, in the old town center of Naples –  that Mennillo staged Atlante della Fertilità (Atlas of Fertility) between the end of 2011 and the beginnings of 2012.

«When I was in Naples, I started writing a poem about a Western city, portraying its habits and manners, verses which arose every morning when I woke up. I had a draft almost every morning. Once I finished the poem, I was convinced that the operation should stop with the writing process itself and I decided to add a visual part to the poem. I started this visual work in New York during the following fall when I finished the final draft. Photographs, papers, cardboards, sketches on notebooks, books from local markets, objects found in the street, materials to be used for collages; once I got back to Italy with sketched collages from New York, I understood that the poetical work could go beyond the collages and that instead it could have sound and installation applications».

From there, the natural need was that of setting up his own Atlas, consciously inspired by Warburg’s precedent Mnemosyne-Atlas, in a physical and “sensual” space in Naples. Mennillo’s physical and sensual space is obviously a sensory space, a dimension dedicated to the experimentation of physical perceptions and coming directly from senses, where the mixture of space, language and sound is creatively experimented by the artist and perceptively ventured by the beholder.

The need of creating a classification system for memory comes from the idea that «memory is the basis of human thought and it is conceived via emotional images». Creating a sensual space made up of sounds, smells and especially images, Mennillo gives the possibility to the visitors of Atlas to meet a series of combinations of images of three cities  symbols of the Western decadence, Naples, Paris and New York: «The past of those images was mine, but symbols and images were communal heritage which could be grasped and met by those people wandering around the installations and whose memory was put into close contact with stimulations-thoughts».

It is exactly the role of nowadays decayed capitals of the Western culture that allows the artist to associate the cities of Naples, Paris and New York in his Atlas. This work, indeed, made up of thinking and poetic language –  with the fundamental role of images – digs up memory to reveal the decadence and oblivion of our age: «The slow oblivion of images is what strong powers and the related economies aim the most to for the individual, their attentions and cares are often directed towards those even very slight processes of evaporation and formation of thoughts which come from images».

The production of Atlas took up a lot of Domenico’s time (from 2008 to 2011). During this long period, he had the opportunity to search for the known and the unknown through the innumerable visual and sound combinations which were offered by the chosen places, as well as to confront himself with three key figures which characterize the work as a whole: Giordano Bruno, Abi Warburg and Charles Baudelaire.

The exhibition, indeed, went through three rooms. The first room was inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s Addiition de la troisième édition des Fleures du Mal: paper drawings, which illustrated and expanded Baudelaire’s texts, took inspiration from Giordano Bruno’s engravings which he employed to clarify his philosophical writings. «Baudelaire has always been a very important author for me (and not only for me); all of his words, from verses to fragments of unfinished projects, conceal treasures which meant a lot for the 20^th century as a whole to understand the fundamental contradictions and implications of modernity».

The second room hosted an “infinite library” or a “library of the infinity,” which conceptually recalled Warburg Institute Library in Hamburg. Finally, the third room hosted an installation with soundtrack from the unpublished poem Atlante della Fertilità (Atlas of Fertility), realized through super8 projectors and analog machines from the 70s (this project was born in collaboration with composer and musician Nino Bruno).

Domenico Mennillo will exhibit again in  Naples next December in the rooms of Nitsch Museum, with the show Alcune Architetture di Napoli 2003-2013 – Il teatro di lunGrabbe nelle architetture napoletane: a retrospective to celebrate ten years of activity for lunGrabbe in Naples. LunGrabbe theatre, founded by Domenico Mennillo and Rosaria Castiglione in 2001, is based on the duo architecture-theatre and centered on Mennillo’s writings. It employs always different spatial solutions and favors performances simulating representational theatre. During these past years, cinema as well has gained a lot of attention thanks to films and videos in relation with performances and poems-concerts, which focus on verses and acoustic or electronic instruments and are practically always staged outside the theatre itself.