In Italian, pupa means “doll” and is often used as an affectionate epithet when referring to a little girl or, in a more provocative sense, to a beautiful woman as well as to indicate various traditional Italian sweets. Through this multilayered play on language and symbolism, with Pupa, Grossi Maglioni embark on a research-driven exploration of care, body representation, and the reclamation of desire and pleasure. By focusing on anthropomorphic sweets, the duo recreates the pupa in various forms, observing their organic evolution and deterioration as well as the ways in which humans interact with these more-than-human entities. Encompassing workshops, installations, a video as well as pop songs and sound installations, realised in collaboration with Andreina Noce aka Eva Geist, Grossi Maglioni critically interrogates the sexual models inherited within the patriarchal family across generations, while engaging with themes of pleasure, folklore and myths of femininity tied to ritual food and the earth.
Drawing from childhood play, as seen in the soil cake, or domestic traditions, like the Abruzzese Pupa cake, the artworks navigate the fine line between affection and celebration, and the underlying dynamics of obligation, violence and objectification that such traditions can evoke or symbolically reinforce while moving away from the objectified representation of the body per se. Rather, the creatures imagined by Grossi Maglioni, consistent with their practice, take on indefinite, even monstrous qualities. Whilst building on common elements of Beast Mother research, Grossi Maglioni aim to broaden their focus with PUPA to explore how pleasure, desire and affectivity as the process of becoming (or becoming again) a subject are experienced across different bodies and subjectivities, interweaving play, struggle and ferocity.
While addressing political and social concerns, these forms already contain within themselves the potential for their own subversion. Across the different artworks realised so far, the artists encourage a deeper contemplation of the maternal body – as an emblem of the objectified and neutralised body – and how this is shaped by expectations, responsibilities and interdependencies, along with the cyclical nature of life and regeneration.
