Margherita Pevere

At the beginning of 2016, Margherita Pevere (33) developed an artistic research project on the earthquake in the Italian region Friuli in 1976 and how it disrupted local communities. For this project, she collaborated with Hommelette, an Italian cultural association for cinema studies: “I manipulated found footage with no archival value to investigate the erosive power of time and nature on individual memory. This is how Liquid Debris was born.” In this series Margherita concentrates on erasure and erosion of the visual information stored in the gelatine layer of photographic film, which is based on animal gelatine.

Margherita’s work is about showing two interrelated phenomena regarding human legacy: “The human attempt of opposing the transience of life by storing information and the unavoidable erosive process which impends over us,” she explains. As an artist working with technology and biological matter, Margherita is interested in how materials can be transformed as transformation is a crucial element in organic as well as technological processes. In this work Margherita cultivates sprouts and moulds on 35mm film; corrodes 8mm film with her own gastric juice and obliterates images on 16 mm footage by first erasing the gelatine and then writing on it. During the Dutch Design Week of 2016 she exhibited the 8mm film as part of her series to convey The Essence of Transience.