Green Diamond. A Love Story
by Rachele Maistrello
“All readings are also misreadings, re-readings, partial readings, imposed readings, and imagined readings of a text that is originally and finally never simply there. Just as the world is originally fallen apart, the text is always already enmeshed in contending practices and hopes.”
– Donna J. Haraway
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
It´s a love story, but a tragic one. The project Green Diamond by artist Rachele Maistrello is an imagined archive, telling a love story of reality and fiction, of human and nature, and of a factory worker and an acrobat. Throughout her practice, Maistrello has used photography as a medium of storytelling. In her current project, photographs of the acrobat Gao Yue wearing a green full-body suit are fused with cut-outs of an oversized green diamond. The photographs are extended by videos and works on paper that build an imagined archive of the Green Diamond factory, set in the late 1990s in the outskirts of Beijing. The full archive of the Green Diamond project is accessible online with sections currently exhibited at the MAXXI.
The project describes cyborgian experiments, designed to create sensory experiences of nature. The visitor discovers the factory´s workings through conversations between the acrobat Gao Yue and factory worker Li Jian Ping. The late-nineties email communication creates a sense of historical distance, leaving the visitor comfortably wandering through the image and text documents, not wanting to question their authenticity. In the story around Gao Yue, we learn about the chip experiments. We eventually discover how these experiments not only seem to slowly weaken Gao Yue physically but further prevent her from experiencing inter-human love. The love story of Gao Yue and Li Jian Ping does not have a happy end, just like the modernist longing to control nature.
Green Diamond was developed during research trips to Beijing. It is a reflection of its hyper urbanity and staging of modernist futures. A feeling of utopia and dystopia is accelerated in China´s urban environment. In Green Diamond, nature becomes a mere projection of a feeling. For centuries, technology has been developed to alter nature or make us independent of it. After entering the age of the Anthropocene we are now faced with the consequences. From wildfires, floods to the current challenge of a pandemic, the destruction of natural habitat for human development demands structural change. Rachele Maistrello´s dystopian retrospective into a nature simulation lab that seemed a realistic vision of the future in the 90s, can be read as a commentary on a current ideological struggle on finding a new relationship towards nature and our planet. Using the ambiguity of photography, she creates a speculative a place that never was but could have been while raising the question of where we are heading.
Text by: Antonie Angerer
The archive, a personal and collective memory outside of classic narrative plots, is at the centre of the two award-winning works.
The Graziadei Prize for Photography was established in 2012 by Graziadei Studio Legale with the dual aim of promoting the work of young authors and supporting it over time. In 2020, the jury composed of Giovanna Calvenzi, Armin Linke, Francesco Graziadei, Margherita Guccione and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi declared Rachele Maistrello’s Green Diamond project the winner. Her work is on display with Occult, a new project by Alba Zari, winner of the Prize in 2019 with The Y.
Green Diamond by Rachele Maistrello reconstructs the love story born inside a Chinese factory between a worker, Li Jian Ping, and an acrobat, Gao Yue. Hovering between reconstruction and authenticity, between the possible and the plausible, the project reflects the reliability of the archive and its extraordinary imaginative potential.
For Alba Zari, on the other hand, the archive is the starting point for exploring the roots of her own identity. In Occult, images from the family archive and the Children of God’s propaganda, the sect the artist was born into, constitute the sources of a story in which personal and collective events are intertwined. In contrast, the photographs and film footage taken during the journey seem to sublimate the painful existential content of her story.
header: Rachele Maistrello, “Gao Yue #1”, 1998-1999, courtesy of the artist. Alba Zari, “Awakening in Zen Beach. Koh Phangan”, Thailand, 2020, courtesy the artist.
green diamond
Green Diamond. A Love Story
Alba Zari. Occult