- MARCO BALBI DIPALMA

HOLOGRAPHIC VIDEOSCULPTURES

SELF-PORTRAIT IN THE MIRROR: FRAGILITY

Selezionato “Paratissma “Nice & fair – Show don’t tell!” 2024

Finalist expositivaart 2025

The self-portrait has no words, it expresses itself in silent contemplation of Self. The body reflected in the mirror reveals a lived space. The video reflects on the fragility of Being. I needed to see myself with my inner eye, to find an existential meaning after disenchantment. Scrutinise myself to open a renewed vision, beyond the veil, to be reborn. The projection of the body becomes a path to knowledge of the soul.

The datamoshing technique breaks up the figure into luminous matter. The jagged colours reveal the ambivalence of inner fragmentation. Being fragmented, expresses the pain of the loss of identity form, but at the same time fragmenting, as in a Buddhist meditation technique, is a practice to seek a broader vision of being. The body, painted in the mirror, evokes its presence in space and connotes itself as a 'spatial self'. In the duality of the reflection it represents a locus amoenus, it appears as "the other than me", "the elsewhere."

The camera, in the relationship of gaze with the mirror and the observer, poses a paradox: the camera reinforces identity, making it a threshold of passage towards the relationship to the "you that can be me". The body in the mirror is the fragile touch of the soul. An inner space that unites us. In the mirror, the human figure opens itself to dialogue with the Being.

MARCO BALBI DIPALMA | ARTIST

Perceiving physicality, not only as a material dimension, but as a veritable language of glimpses and fissures, he highlights its ambivalent entity suspended between presence and absence. In investigating the existential and psychological realm of human beings, Marco Balbi Dipalma weaves autobiographical experiences, exploring pain as a source of knowledge and the power to transform relationships and spirituality. In the video installation Self-portrait in the mirror: Fragility the artist stages a self in which the mirror is not just a physical double, but is transformed into an ego that opens up to the being of the other: the mirror thus becomes a means of discovering and questioning identity. It is not just an exploration of the ego, but an investigation into shared fragility, in a continuous relationship between identity and otherness.

ELENA SILLITTI | CURATOR