federica del re

Zoè Gruni calls herself a nomad. She journeys between continents and cultures, past and present: a traveller seeking to understand the nature of the human being’s existential restlessness. Zoè enunciates her visual language by drawing from the roots of the people’s imagination. She concentrates her research on the possibility of finding visual forms that highlight the feelings, memories and intimate individual fears crystallised in the stereotypes of legends and popular myths. This is how Zoè Gruni tackles art, by disproving that it is impossible to fathom the different forms of interior restlessness.
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The subject of Zoè Gruni’s artistic research has always been to rediscover mythologies and popular tales in order to verify their possible symbolic meaning and timeless significance. The artist’s research is situated in the space between the individual and collective imagination, finding a physical form of expression for bodiless myths relegated to spoken tales.
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The figures come to represent the individual’s interior demons and therefore that subconscious emotional reality which has always been encapsulated in man, even in the modern and rational era. Liquid fears, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls them, the fears that prevent man from being truly free, are all around us, even in the modern day.

Franziska Nori, Zoè, nomad artist, in Zoè Gruni, 2004-2014 Mitopoiesi, edizioni Il Ponte, Florence 2014

What we imagine, exists. In creating a myth, the imagination becomes real; and that which already lives in the universal and multiple creations of the collectivity adds to it. We invent the impossible, the meanings multiply. We reconstruct other facets of language and interpretation. Zoè Gruni’s mythopoetics is a process that builds up critical inventions and her own synthesis of this collectively individual imagination.
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A myth is made like that. It originates in a tradition and can be interpreted in different ways; it can be told in line with the standard reading, but it is open to transmutations imagined by the interlocutor and its creator, as it moves and is observed going by. A myth leaves its story and meaning open, its cycle knows no end and it enables the free association of ideas. That which could be surreal and absurd becomes reality; as the myth is built, it becomes real, it joins together the inaccessible unconscious and recent memory, and thus embodies countless forms of life. Myths are founded on free poetics and are unbound from formal logic; they go beyond themselves, to concisely embody the contents of many analyses.

Xico Chaves, Zoè: mythopoetics / the contemporary embodiment of myth, in Zoè Gruni, 2004-2014 Mitopoiesi, edizioni Il Ponte, Florence 2014