Conversation with Matilde Cadenti

“Thinking of a work that might express how I’m experiencing these times, in which our sense of normality has been profoundly shaken, I’m reminded of the artist Marco Maria Zanin, whose artistic research has often explored the rural and peripheral areas of his (and my) native region, Veneto.
I’m currently spending this quarantine period in the countryside near Mogliano, and from my window I can glimpse a few rural ruins that bring to mind Zanin’s photographic series Cattedrali rurali. These lost remnants in the Venetian countryside stand still and solemn, like a surreal freeze-frame: they seem removed from the flow of time, suspended and frozen, yet they must once have been homes, or perhaps storage buildings, symbolic places of a temporality deeply tied to the land. A time marked by small rituals linked to family and the home.
In these complex times of enforced isolation, it’s impossible not to think about loved ones.
But also about Venice, about work, about the rhythm of the city, so different from the agrarian rhythm I now find myself confined to: slow, shaped by the work of human hands, an expression of the sacred bond that people in the past knew how to establish with the land. A kind of work that becomes a matrix of human language and identity, an expression of a community and a society that—once this moment of emergency has passed—will try to rebuild many things, perhaps starting precisely from those traditions and forms of knowledge that rural labor is steeped in.”