OASI (BATTICUORE) | MARTA MARGNETTI

Marta Margnetti (Mendrisio, Switzerland, 1989) focuses her artistic exploration on the domestic environment and family ties, examining memory and the identity of influential female figures. Her work is intimate and deeply rooted in personal experiences, from which she draws to investigate social dynamics and the way parents pass values and behavioral models to their children. Margnetti questions what legacy—material or immaterial—is passed down from our family members and what ways of being, thinking, or acting we absorb and make our own.
The artist collects sounds, remembrances, and emotions, which she then transforms into tangible artworks, in a process that seeks to give concrete shape to memory, to fix it in space and time, and, in doing so, to preserve it.

Oasi (batticuore) is an artwork created in 2024 consisting of four plexiglass letters—forming the word OASI (oasis)—illuminated with red LED lights recovered from an old highway service station.
These letters, programmed with an Arduino system, light up to the rhythm of the artist’s own heartbeat, simulating a constant, living pulse.
The concept of a ‘calm place’ is not explicitly depicted; instead, it hovers between fantasy and reality. This project addresses places of transition, boundaries, and idealized spaces not only through the semantic meaning of the word ‘OASI’ but also through the origin of the materials used: the gas station.

The installation, through an association of ideas and meanings, invites reflection on the need to distinguish what is visible in appearance—on the outside, superficially—from what is experienced intimately.
Why do we tend to keep separate what we show on the outside from what really happens inside the home? Through her artworks, the artist attempts to dissolve the invisible wall that separates reality from its surface representation.
Through her practice, Margnetti shares fragments of her emotional and domestic world, bringing the audience into an intimate dimension that also prompts viewers to reflect on their own sentimental bonds and on how these are ‘displayed’ to others.

Marta Margnetti
Oasi (batticuore), 2024
Found plexiglass letters, LED, Arduino, 230 x 42 x 9,5 cm
Installation view at “Serenata,” Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen, February 17 – May 12, 2024.
Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, E. Sommer.

09/11/24