VB – BV (Vaiano-Bologna / Bologna-Vaiano) developed as a series of notes on landscape and movement between the place where I grew up and Bologna, the nearby city where, in 2020, I had cultivated relationships with spaces and people.
With the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, the notion of movement and the sharing of urban public space shifted. Distances once described by railways, roads, and routes became defined by plants, parks, hills, mountains, and hidden forest paths still accessible in the countryside. Abandoned houses and mountain trails emerged as some of the few places that could still be collectively inhabited.
Conceptually, distances expanded while affections moved within a blurred web of physical and digital ties. Differences in administrative boundaries mattered little: everywhere – within four walls and by the street – domestic space was redefined.
Overlaps appeared between people and places I had inhabited, creating correspondences across different geographies. The works of this period are small, domestic, and imaginative—reflections on how one place may correspond to many others, and how connections themselves narrate space. They trace the transition from grey cities to green urban parks, the rediscovery of running, and the privilege of being able to move and reflect on movement.
Enclosed domesticity allowed me to imagine exterior space, while also marveling at a world flourishing without us.
The series consists of notes, drawings, and small paintings, alongside many sketchbooks collected in NOTES—not a series in the strict sense, but an attempt to record the images that made me think.
Below, in order, photos of:
¨ Grids for Overlapping Spaces / mixed media on canvas / 2020
¨ Untitled / oil and pencil on canvas / 2020
¨ Ginevra / pencil on canvas / 2020
¨ VB – BV / oil and pencil on canvas / 2020
¨ Untitled / oil and pencil on canvas / 2020
Grid for Overlapping Spaces originates from a reflection on measurement, geometry, and the tools we use to read and map space. The grid is not used to contain, but to relate, serving as an orientation within a landscape made of layers and impressions rather than coordinates.
At its core lies the — ironic and symbolic — encounter between my initials, CM (Cristina Materassi), and the abbreviation cm, a standardized unit of measurement. While “cm” describes distances and dimensions impersonally, “CM” represents my body and presence in space: a lived, subjective measure.
This play between uppercase and lowercase opens up a double reading: 164.5 cm is my height, a scientific datum but also the first measure through which the body positions itself in the world, relating to objects, architectures, and other bodies. Measurement thus becomes embodied, relational, and symbolic.
The overlap between proper name and metric system activates a reflection on the scale of things and on how we define reality: a centimeter can be microscopic or immense, depending on one’s perspective. In this sense, CM becomes a tool of translation between inside and outside, personal and collective, measurable and imagined.
