Cristiana de Marchi: Inked Skin

In every city, to dig down the surfaces and to reach beneath the skin of the city you must simply walk. Yet this is not enough for the Italian artist. De Marchi enjoys walking, observing and documenting aspects of the life of individuals while walking through the city, but she constantly searches for an interaction; a personal one, a silent and solitary one. Walls!

Walls bare messages which nature significantly changes according to every individual’s specification; messages such as love and hate, politics and peace or simply unspoken and forbidden messages.

In 2011 de Marchi started walking through the writings, drawings and graffitis of the urban walls of Beirut, Dubai and Kuwait and captured images of scarred walls with messages reflecting the spirit and the “inner” character of ordinary people.

Naming each of these ongoing series after the city, the artist was inspired from her interest in the interaction between people and power and groups expressing and reacting to their feelings and thoughts in public and social spaces by tattooing words and graffitis on the skin of walls. She finds these messages like scarred tattoos on a body leaving memories and marks behind.

“Walls can become the occasion and the surface for communication, an indirect one where the time of writing is not the same one as the time of reading.”

De Marchi finds needles and embroidery—a traditional technique reserved to women—a significant part of her art that deals with political issues. Much of the embroideries in her photos negotiate a contrast between women’s slow and silent but yet strong and powerful positions in today’s world.

After capturing and printing the eye catching images of the “tattoos” protected on the walls, she then selects an element in the photo and using cotton thread and a needle she starts a very unique and classic embroidery on the selected piece on the photo.

In her Black series, a project based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, de Marchi translated the 30 articles of the declaration into Braille and then embroidered them with black thread on 30 black canvasses. The work alludes to the inaccessibility to human rights and their continuous violations.

Cristiana de Marchi was born in Turin, Italy. She currently lives and works in Beirut and Dubai.In the past years she has held several solo and group exhibitions in the UAE, the USA, Italy, the UK, Mexico, the Netherlands, Lebanon and Switzerland.