Leaves in the wind

The installation ‘leaves in the wind’ consists of a white wall and forty-five leaves, all of different shapes and sizes, as well as their different origins. The leaves, placed next to each other, are made of plaster and resin and all white to emphasize the homogeneity in their diversity. The proximity of the leaves is random and temporary. When the wind arrives, the leaves will spread in another location.

The leaf symbolizes the inevitability of change and renewal. The leaves have healing and protective powers. The leaves of this installation are we human beings, all different, close but at the mercy of the wind of life that takes us to places unknown to us.

The white wall is the place where we ideally live and represents our invisible destiny: it takes on thickness and matter through the leaves that seem to emerge. The wall, where we are temporarily hung, implies by the leaves the casual fact of being in one point rather than another.  To be depicted is a mental place to describe the uncertainty of the fate of human beings. “White strikes us as a great silence that seems absolute to us,” wrote Kandinskij. White as abstraction and subtraction. White is the wall and white are the leaves, different in form, like a story of different destinies and silences. The certainty of being in a guarded place for a long time or in a comfortable situation does not exist. We all, in the time that we are given to live, like leaves, travel in the world regardless of our will. We try to control and choose our journey but, forces greater than ourselves, they establish our path.

The artist Micaela Legnaioli wants to make us reflect on the unintentional and accidental fact of being in a certain place because of the unpredictability of life that, like the wind with its leaves, disrupts, moves and mixes, deciding the destiny of each one.

Micaela, born in 1970, was born in New Delhi, India and has lived in many European and South American countries before settling in Rome in the last decade. The installation “Leaves in the Wind” takes on the meaning of a reflection on her existential path that has seen her live in different cities around the world. Over the years, the artist has applied herself to different painting, sculpture and ceramic techniques. His artistic research has always focused on the identity of individuals and couples and on the traces that every human being leaves more or less voluntarily. Her research is intellectual and material, ranging from the physical fingerprint of the Traces, through the symbolic representation of the portraits of the most famous characters in the history of the West engraved on zinc and copper plates, now contemplates with the site-specific installation “Leaves in the Wind” the awareness of random and involuntary data that can mark the life of everyone. Being physically in one place rather than another and having people/leaves beside them rather than others. Micaela, who has modelled, engraved and penetrated the essence of her characters to represent the value of their uniqueness, now turns her gaze to fate and chance to investigate the existential path of each one. From the individual he points his gaze to the whole of a group of human beings to investigate the existential path of each one. It seems to want to tell us: we are different, we are unique, we can not always choose where to be and who to have next but we are not alone. It reaches the core of the meaning of life and has the value of a consolatory embrace to humanity.    

Sabrina Consolini