Laura Lodigiani, born in Milan, graduated in set design at the Brera Academy and lives and works in Florence. She has worked in theater for public bodies and private companies, with many exhibitions and awards, her works are all over the world in public and private collections, and journalism and writing are also part of her activities.
Masking, virtual reality, advertising, and why not the very pages of the paper information, with the costume and appearance of Harlequin, the mask par excellence of commedia dell’arte, is certainly for me a way to seek the truth, to reveal the secrets and lies that reach the press every day. Suggestive and seductive lies that, like mirror games, send us back our image and our continually deformed ego. Arlecchino highlights this game through its different but defined chromaticity, in which we can recognize the hostility in the difference and the complicity in the definition. Difference is always experienced as hostile and is often a source of shame. The simplest example? The color of the skin! Skin color plays a fundamental role in our lives, even if we are hardly aware of it.
My Harlequin is an interpreter and also an exhortation of the possible awakening of our senses to the chrome language, the understanding of which would open up infinite horizons for our spirit and our body. The different colors that form Harlequin’s dress are the symbol of his shame, they make clear his ‘need’, his poverty, and his having to make do not only to find the daily meal by any means, but also to constantly patch up the dress with always new patches taken here and there and never the same, as well as her improvised and patched up life in work and relationships. The Harlequin mask lives in a hostile world where he is often forced into shameful actions of pure survival. But Harlequin, in his need, can also be great, because he is free and imaginative. He knows that surviving is the crux of life itself.
The definition is to give order to the difference; therefore, the pieces of the dress take a defined and geometric shape, a highly dynamic network, always looking forward to the future and never backward to the past. The lines that limit the chromatic differences form a tangle of complicity that creates an aura of unrepeatable sympathy around the reckless character. Harlequin is the theatrical mask par excellence, as fictitious as it is real. In his contradictions the difficult road to freedom. Deprived of freedom we are no longer and will be something else, different and torn pieces to be put back together.
