Current Winner
Melania Toma GBA
Melania Toma GBA is an Italian multi-disciplinary artist living and working in London. At the center of her practice lies the exploration of the narrative subjectivity - intersubjective we, within traversing webs of gender, power hierarchies, and ecological degradation.
These intersectional analyses include the often less visible ‘intimate’ scales, such as concepts of hybrid femininity, structures of domesticity, and the possibilities of the transformative power of the self. She questions the palimpsest of colonial ideologies and narratives that are necessarily linked to them, through research that highlights the theme of collecting as a practice. She creates works that serve as trans-morphing objects not only rooted in one geographical place and culture but as interconnected process around the notion of cure.
Language and our possibility to communicate with the pluriversal realities are at the center of her latest production. Lead by the desire to make this interaction, she carries a visual semantic research that plays with the double forces of construction-deconstruction of the real. The work she produces is a manifestation of this process of translation. Her work seems to address a fictual-nomadic space where childhood-world imaginary and ancestral symbols are merged with personal stories, icons, inner voices and myths.
Toma conceives of these works as trans-morphing, ghost-hybrid creatures whose extrinsic power crosses the boundaries between the individual and the collective. These embodiments are questioning the schisms of biomedicine inside post-human beings that are profoundly linked with the social-environmental context and the unseen realm of spirits.
Melania reacted with the following words on hearing that she was the winner of the 2024 Thread Residency:
'I am really looking forward to working in Sinthian! Thanks to the possibility of working with new natural materials like sand, earth and plant fibres, I can expand my research around the idea of self merging with the ecological surroundings. I would love to use this experience to create a new body of work reflecting this unique place designed to allow kinship between different communities (non-human, earth and spiritual communities).
Creating in this specific setting will allow me to expand my research around ways of negotiating the idea of ‘border’. I see the rich rich presence of dialects in the region as an opportunity to focus on the exploration of boundaries between language and reality. I can't wait to see which portals Thread will open to my practice! '
