COUSCOUS
On the right side of a split screen appears an assembly of family footage shot in Tripoli in the early ‘60s, over which the artist father’s voice explains his couscous recipe in Italian. While he talks about the recipe, an English text appears on the left side of the screen. This text is not the translation into English of the father’s recipe, but rather an emotional decoding of it. Using an imaginary dictionary, the artist translates her father’s culinary love into a different conversation.
The father’s Italian voice over serves as a sort of musical score that conveys passion, it might as well be in Arabic or any other language and it is not meant to be translated or subtitled.
BIO
Marina Sagona is an Italian and American multimedia conceptual artist.
She has diverse experiences in the arts. Early in her career, she studied Art History at the University La Sapienza in Rome and was the postmodern artist Mario Schifano’s studio assistant. After arriving in New York in 1995, she illustrated for The New Yorker and the New York Times.
Her curatorial practice includes a collaboration with PS1 MoMA founder and curator Alanna Heiss on the exhibition Senso Unico in New York in 2008 and in 2014 the exhibition Dante Ferretti: Design and Construction for the Cinema at MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Sagona is also the recipient of the 2019 Domus Artist Residency in Galatina, Italy, and the 2021 Chiquita Room Gallery Residency in Barcelona, Spain.
In 2021, in collaboration with Ravenna Festival, she published the Comedy of Women on Dante’s Divine Comedy’s female figures, with written contributions by Colum McCann, Judith Thurman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Leslie Jamison and Claire Messud.
In 2022 she was nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.
In 2023 her film Stabat Mater won the Cadence Video Poetry Festival award, the Best Script/Concept Award at Ribalta Experimental Film Festival and Best Experimental Film Award at Sipontum Arthouse International Film festival.
In 2024 her film Your Dream is My Dream won the Cleveland Arthouse Film Festival’s Best Experimental Film Award and the Geneva International Film Festival’s Best Experimental Film Award.