Maria Teresa Sartori

For a few years, Maria Teresa Sartori has created videos that make no allowances for aestheticizing or facile imagery. Instead, she presents complex reflections on the mechanisms of our surroundings. In Tutte le pause del mondo (All the Pauses in the World), 2006, the cornerstone of this show, the artist investigates language, documenting a conversation between two seated people who know they are being filmed as they respond to a questionnaire. What they do not know, however, is that Sartori is interested not in what they say but rather in the pauses between one phrase and the next, a curiosity reflected subtly by the dilating register of the video’s running time stamp. In another room, Sartori presents graphic representations of her speakers’ voices. Other videos consider different forms of human interaction, such as visual memory, feelings, and passions. In these investigations, the artist confronts existence as a sort of scientist, an anthropologist ready to observe and record, in apparently objective fashion, the ways in which we respond to one another. It is to her credit that the results of these inquiries take on lives of their own.