MARIA JOSÉ PALLA – “My room in Montrouge” and Other Photographs

MARIA JOSÉ PALLA

“My room in Montrouge”

and

Other Photographs

My room in Montrouge

Let those who are on the edge of the Alps, in winter, in Turin — which is almost as cold as Saint Petersburg, mind you — travel around their room. But with this climate, with this air that God has given us, where the orange tree grows effortlessly and the scrub is made of myrtle, even Xavier de Maistre, if he had written here, would at least have gone as far as the backyard.

Travels in My Homeland, Almeida Garrett

What seduces me in the opening line of Travels in My Homeland by Almeida Garrett is the way it suggests the many forms that the idea of travel can take — including the journey within oneself, certainly the most important one, which can just as well be undertaken inside a house as around the world. I did not go as far as the backyard. I travelled in my room, to borrow the title of Xavier de Maistre, Voyage autour de ma chambre. The journey began and ended with 16 Polaroids with satins piled upon my bed, in my room, in Montrouge, in 1997. Four series (I like working in series, which I have done in portraits and self-portraits) of four different objects or colors: red — of power, of danger, of blood; white — of purity; yellow — of transgression, breaking the harmony of the other colors. I am interested in the everyday and everything that surrounds me: I like to transform and exalt. In this particular case, I focused on clothing removed from its context (the body), crumpled, shaped, pleated, stretched or reduced. Clothing, the object closest to man — our second skin — appears here as if the body were still present, its extension. Love, or 0, as Sophie Calle says in her admirable film?

Thus exposed, the garment resembles a naked body, it becomes shameful. When Adam and Eve transgressed by tasting the forbidden fruit — that is, by attempting to seize the knowledge of good and evil and the power to know and judge — then the eyes of both were opened, and recognizing that they were naked, they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves to wear around their waists. (Genesis 3:7)

Pavia, Outubro de 1998

 Maria José Palla