Who is Mariella Simoni

Mariella Simoni’s artistic production, in the beginning, expressed a penchant for the philosophical and psychological. This was manifested through a series of exhibitions at Galleria Piero Cavellini , Galleria Luigi De Ambrogi in Milan, and Galleria De Ambrogi-Cavellini in Brescia and Milan between 1975 and 1978; and through her participation in the group exhibition at Galleria Cavellini in Brescia; and Magma. Rassegna internazionale di donne artiste (Magma. International Exhibition of Women Artists), an all-female exhibition about multi-media, the body and feminism curated by Loda Romana at Museo Castelvecchio in Verona in 1977. Le verbe être de G. Bataille (The verb to be G. Bataille) in 1976 at Galleria Luigi De Ambrogi in Milan, for example, was made up of twenty-five assemblages of pages copied from the complete works of Bataille and an atlas of human anatomy depicting various parts of the human body. Sulla pelle di un Witz (On the Skin of a Witz) at Galleria Cavellini in 1975, on the other hand, consisted in a handwritten Foucault-text which she juxtaposed with a map of the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux, and in the group exhibition Magma, she was present with a multiple-slide projection with scintigraphic images of cerebral cancer, including a text that elaborated on the connection between, on the one hand, the conception of the brain, and on the other, the conception of art. During this period Simoni used relatively simple techniques: slide projectors to produce a multiple-slide room, and making creatively use of the Xerox machine, mostly by means of overprinting and creating copies of copies to degrade the image, as successive copies were made onto the same sheet of paper more than once.