“Habitus”: a Latinism used in medicine, biology and other fields, to indicate the habit, the complex of morphological or behavioral characters of an individual or species; more generically an attitude, a tendency.
Through the body we have access to space; in the period of confinement, the gaze immediately took me to search the most vital and close place: my garden.
The project aims to describe the emotional journey that led my body to investigate and inhabit those metamorphoses that the plant world gives us.
The garden has been the protagonist and host of my wandering, of the identification of a place capable of mutating and sprouting life.
In the restitution of this sort of emotional taxonomy, cyanotype, a pioneer of photography, sought to restore the change that occurs through light in a particular fraction of time and space of that life in metamorphosis. In its evanescent trace it testifies to a presence/absence that keeps changing over time: from epidermis to bone structure, from flower to roots.
Indulging the inclination of my body and obeying the inner need to experience deeply the contact with nature by following its transformation times, I understood the familiar habit of living.
“The garden is a carnal form of travel in which the trajectories of emotions trace circular paths that produce a spinning journey placing the reader within a true carousel of love” (Giuliana Bruno “Atlas of Emotions”)
“The taxonomic exercise carried out by Monia Strada speaks to us of body and space, in which the combination of chemistry and light brings out life on the canvas. In the gap that occurs between inner need and relationship with nature – emerging within her personal hortus conclusus – the reactivity to light gives rise to the configuration of continuous inner change.” Anton Roca
