Marina Ballo Charmet is a psychoanalyst by training, an artist by passion. She uses photography and video as tools of reconnaissance. In her videos, as in her photographs, silhouettes of people or hard-to-identify objects alternate with glimpses of an everyday yet indeterminate urban topography and architectural details of interiors or exteriors. But in the environments she navigates, Marina Ballo avoids everything that might appear anomalous or exceptional, choosing instead to focus on the nondescript objects that make up our daily surroundings—on what usually remains confined to the periphery of our gaze and our thoughts. She brushes past things and people without attempting to frame them or clearly define their contours. She favors nuance and uncertain boundaries over anything overt or ostentatious. She lingers on the way light filters through the slats of a window, the weave of a fabric, the fold of a dress, the texture of someone’s skin as we converse with them, or the details of an interior that should feel familiar: all those always-seen things whose existence we take for granted. She dwells on what we usually overlook, what is destined to serve as background, becoming what she herself calls “the background noise of our minds.” It is this “always-seen” that the artist aims to capture, to rescue from habit: hers is a journey of rediscovery into what we already believed we knew.

The result is images that are not overtly descriptive, acquiring an almost mental quality—some parts in focus, others not—familiar and elusive at the same time, caught from the corner of the eye, as when our wandering and inattentive perception drifts over things we see without truly registering them.

The videos and video installations: Dimmi; Disattenzioni; Lettura; Stazione Eretta; Passi leggeri, were produced between 1999 and 2003.
Gabi Scardi