Gesti di relazione (Relationship gestures) is an ongoing project that interrogates the complex relationship between images, mythologies, and affects by means of photography, performance and video. The project seeks to deconstruct and expand the visual meanings and iconographies that underpin both individual and collective imagination, as well as art history, challenging their supposed neutrality and the subtle ways in which they shape patterns of social interaction. Emphasis is placed on the expressive dimension of these scenes and on how they contribute to affirming and perpetuating complex relations of power, political as much as affective. The gesture is observed as an ambiguous action, capable of conveying a constellation of emotions or dispositions, while also embodying forms of violence and oppression that become naturalised through everyday repetition. Through the development of an archive of gestures, derived from both personal memories and historical, artistic and political images, Grossi Maglioni explores the layered meanings embedded in bodily interactions between subjects and their surrounding environment, revealing how even the most intimate or fleeting movement may carry multiple narratives within it and inviting us to critically observe what we embody and reproduce through our movements. The artists thus investigate the potential for resignification, opening up new ways of engaging with and negotiating relational dynamics across diverse social and spatial contexts as well as within the duo itself.
