Marco Maria Zanin was born in Padua in October 1983.
He first took a degree in Literature and Philosophy, and then in International Relations, obtaining a Master’s degree in Psychology. At the same time he developed his artistic career, and travelled widely in different parts of the world, putting into practice the “displacement†so essential for a critical analysis of social contexts, and to fuel his research aimed at identifying the common spaces of the human community.
Myth and archetype as the submerged matrices of modern behaviour are the focus of his investigation, which is based on observation of the relationship between man, territory and time.
Lives and works between Padua and São Paulo, Brazil.
The consistency of memory is severely tested by the dynamics of the post-modern metropolis. The material supports on which it rests, whether they are monuments, old buildings, objects or family albums, are regularly swallowed up or demolished by the effects of a blind force that impels towards the new, towards the greatest profit, that rapidly transforms the social and urban fabric of cities and leaves its inhabitants rootless.
San Paolo in Brazil is the biggest “Italian†city after Rome. Starting in 1865, it was here that much of the great immigration wave from Italy, and especially the Veneto countryside, came from across the sea.
Today it is a metropolis with 20 million inhabitants, cultural capital of one of the most dynamic emerging economies, a complex, gigantic and chaotic organism where a multitude of stories, ethnic groups, religions and social classes coexist and butt heads in a continual race towards the future.
Os Argonautas is the desire to immerse myself in this tumult and reassemble the remains of a memory that has linked the histories of two countries, contributing to the economic and cultural development of both, a peculiar form of an age-old practice, that of the journey towards a better destiny.
Among the Argonauts who landed in Brazil there were successful entrepreneurs, artists and other significant figures, but the protagonists of this survey are those more humble agricultural workers and artisans who left their land as the only alternative to poverty. They are often faceless because their identities have been lost in the mists of time and nameless because history did not bother to record them.
Their presence is overwhelmed by the weight and noise of time, made even more acute by the rhythms of the city. Few signs remain, the odd memory intertwined with a dream, shapes that take on other shapes, Re-emerged material, now ready to be worked.
