Time Dust | Martina della Valle

SLENDER TIME
by Marinella Paderni

Things live a time of their own, dissimilar to human time, a slender time made up of minimal particles, elementary traces of its existing, deposits of a silent memory that doesn’t follow the course of History – the memory of cosmic physics and its agents which are repeated to infinity in an eternal recurrence, the memory of matter and antimatter, of the body and natural processes, of entropy and death, which knows no reason without its double, life. Dust is of one such particle, as light is. Light and dust are the substance of this new project from Martina della Valle which she has called Time Dust because dust is time and time is that inscrutable unknown around which every day of life turns. Dust gathered by things, which becomes a part of them, as if they needed this new presence in order to exist, to reveal themselves to our eyes. Forgotten, lost objects whose invisibility seems to be their natural condition until the dust brings us to their ephemeral memory, their slender time.

Martina della Valle’s operation highlights how, in objects that become the “ruin” of a time (her grandfather’s old workshop and its contents, primary school exercise books saved from the pulping machine), other strengths and other forms grow in spite of the objects themselves, giving rise to new meanings. Dust, the yellowing of paper and ceramics, cobwebs, cracks and holes are the elements of this new unity of meaning which elicits the opening up of unpre

•

From a critic essay by Marinella Paderni, written on the occasion of Time Dust, solo show by Martina della Valle, Metronom 2011

Cover image: Martina della Valle, Time Dust (Still Life), 2011
Inkjet print on fine art paper, mounted on aluminium, 50×70 cm

08/01/2018