NEW WORLD

Born in Brescia in 1977, Marta Roberti lives and works in Rome. Her meditative approach lends itself to drawing on paper*. She assembles different elements according to the space available, combining animals, goddesses, self-portraits and fragments of wild, untouched landscapes. The female representations that populate her imagination are essentially major goddesses whose cult flourished at the dawn of civilization. These myths speak of a distant world where women and the feminine creative principle were honored above all else, recognized as the origin of life.

Thanks to excavations carried out by feminist archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, Neolithic cultures have been rediscovered and studied, revealing a real “lost world,” where societies were characterized by their egalitarian dimension. Gender relations were balanced, as female power was considered the highest in the universe, since it had the capacity to give life.

The Mediterranean region, ancient Europe and Anatolia produced an abundance of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images. The cosmogonic goddess – reflecting ritual practices linked to the cycles of the seasons – has for millennia been a metaphor for Nature’s sacred source of life, death and rebirth. Since prehistoric times, earth deities have shaped stories and customs the world over.

The divine figure that first appeared in the Palaeolithic has endured and been worshipped by many civilizations over the ages and millennia, taking on diverse forms, such as the Bronze Age Potnia Theron, Ishtar, Cybele, Durga in Hinduism, the Aztec goddess Coatlicue and many others.

Entitled Ancestors of a time to come, the installation** designed by Marta Roberti for this Dior haute couture défilé is a tribute to these goddesses, supreme forces who governed the universe, divine mothers often accompanied by leopards, bulls, snakes and other animals. A vision of art and life, where the fundamental aim is not to conquer and plunder, but to cultivate the land and provide the material and spiritual necessities for a dignified life.

The presence of animals is essential to this composition. They are beings with whom we share life on Earth, guiding spirits, apotropaic, who are sometimes an integral part of the goddess. The goddess may, for example, have feathers and claws, in a hybridization of animal and human, fused into a single being.

Marta Roberti immerses her female characters in luxuriant nature, blending them with animals with whom they coexist harmoniously. In this cosmogony of freely superimposed symbols belonging to different traditions, the artist also includes several of her self-portraits performing asanas, yoga positions. She offers us an image of herself embodying all her desire to reconstruct a forgotten past in order to repair the torn present.

^{Maria Alicata and Paola Ugolini (exhibition curators)}
^{*Traditional handmade paper from China.}
^{**Marta Roberti’s work, exhibited in the gardens of the Musée Rodin, can be viewed by the public from July 4 to 9, 2023, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.}
^{© Adrien Dirand © Marta Roberti © Chanakya School of Craft}