For this month’s artist spotlight, we step inside the intimate, textured world of Agrigento-based artist Marilina Marchica. Her practice explores the delicate thresholds between presence and absence, construction and erosion, home and memory. Working with layers and fragments, she creates silent landscapes that seem to breathe with forgotten stories.
In our conversation, Marilina reflects on the role of intuition in her process, the evolving meaning of “home,” and the influence of personal and collective memory. Her words echo the same quiet power found in her works—where what remains is just as meaningful as what has disappeared.
Your compositions seem suspended between presence and absence. What emotions or sensations do you hope viewers experience when they encounter your work?
I would like those who view my work to feel a sense of suspension—like the silence that comes just before or after something important. My pieces arise from a process of subtraction and layering, where emptiness holds as much weight as matter. I'm drawn to evoking traces, sedimentations, fragility—elements that speak to what remains, but also to what is missing. I hope the viewer can perceive this duality and allow themselves to be moved by a quiet reflection on time, landscape, and memory.
How do you know when a work is finished? Do you rely on intuition, or is it a more formal decision?
The word “finished” is always relative for me. A work comes to a close when it reaches a balance between form and absence, between construction and fragility. What guides me is intuition, but also a deep listening to the material: it's the fragments, the cracks, the layers that suggest when to stop. More than an end, I see it as a temporary pause in a process that could always continue.
What does “home” mean to you at this moment? And in what way does this concept echo or contrast with what you create?
For me, home is now an inner, unstable space—never definitive. It's tied to memory, to remnants, to walls I’ve inhabited and those I’ve only brushed with my gaze. In my work, home is evoked in walls, in fragments of abandoned architecture, in landscapes marked by time. There’s always a tension between the desire to belong and the need to let go, between building and collapsing. In this sense, my idea of home isn’t a fixed place, but a continuous questioning of what it means to inhabit a space.
Is there something that currently fascinates you that might influence your future work?
Lately I’ve been fascinated by the dialogue between individual memory and collective memory, between visible history and what has been erased. I’m exploring urban archives, relics from demolished buildings, but also oral histories and folk sayings—traces of a diffuse, unwritten knowledge. I believe this research will increasingly shape my practice, especially in site-specific projects where community and landscape merge into a shared narrative.
If your work could whisper something to the viewer, what would it say?
“There is nothing to say: only to be, only to live.”
This quote by Piero Manzoni has accompanied me for a long time, since my studies, and it continues to echo within me. My works don’t seek to explain, but to open a space of presence, where silence, time, and matter can be experienced more than interpreted.
To explore more of Marilina Marchica’s recent work, we invite you to visit her dedicated page on Nomad Art Collective’s ARTSY site.
View Her Works on Artsy → Marilina Marchica
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