b. 1996, Italy
Melania Toma is an Italian multi-disciplinary artist living and working in London.
At centre of her practice lies the exploration of the narrative subjectivity – intersubjective we, within historically situated intersecting webs of gender, power hierarchies, ecological degradation.
These intersectional analyses include the often less visible ‘intimate’ scales, such as concepts of feminine, structures of domesticity, and the possibilities of the transformative power of the self.
She questions the palimpsest of colonial ideologies and narratives that are necessarily linked to them, through a research that highlights the theme of collecting as a practice as not only rooted in one geographical place and culture but also as an interconnected collective process around the notion of cure.
Her personal visual semantic is populated by symbols which translation is a collective act.
She creates works that serve as a transformative/transitional object, whose transformative power crosses the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘I’, producing new ecological imaginaries and understandings of inner or “domestic” places and proposing a rite of liberation towards the recovery of a disintegrated and disconnected self.
Her latest production addresses the notions of collective healing and binge healing creating scultures, conceived as ghost-hybrid creatures, that are questioning the schisms of biomedicine proposing post-human beings that are profoundly linked with the social-environmental context and with the unseen realm of spirits.