"Alla ricerca del tempo perduto"

I am no shadow, though there is a shadow starting from my feet. I am a wife. Sylvia Plath, "Three Women"
Taking needle and cotton thread in hand and employing perfectly calibrated attention, the artist decontextualized situations played out at the limits of time. This is not an act designed merely to lead us back to a distant memory that interests her, but rather to recreate in her own way - as if on hypothetical loom of the lived life - stories and vicissitudes that have been imagined through a multitude of unknown families, all via a particularly defined and original style.
The female role, played out within family dynamics, thus becomes a viaticum of reassembly for an identity both alive and still in being. Oriella Montin selects precise events and salient moments from a life (the birth of a first child, birthdays) to intervene on a practice - the ancient, domestic rite of darning, mending - that symbolizes at once a state of captivity and of unconditional love, as maternal love must be.
Through a twisted voyage into the past, and the imprisonment of the mysterious lives of others that the artist exhumes and brings back into the light, eviscerating the difficulties inherent in relationships through collages that reassemble a world of faces and life experiences, here choosing mainly conceptual compositions, there fully invading the photographic image whith a thick embroidery and elements that move upon a surrealist estrangement, allowing the message to reach us clear and true. The concept of original family, played out on a dual semantic valence as both a place of serenity, profound affection, protection and care; and as the source of unresolvable conflicts, constitutes the point of departure and the uniting thread of memory, while the black and white of the photographs neutralizes different personalities, binding them together to the same, singular destiny.
But that lost, tormented time presupposes a fascinating secret and desire to neither know nor denounce. Because everyone knows that it's difficult to break free of the tangle of family bonds.
And almost no one makes it out unscathed. (by Francesca Baboni)