Description
In Quello che la pelle ricorda (2025), painting becomes a ritual gesture and a narrative bridge between worlds.
The work portrays Nina Gulling, an activist Indigenous woman who, through the ancestral act of painting her body, initiates a silent dialogue with the land and its generative forces.
For many Indigenous cultures of the Amazon, body painting is far more than ornamentation — it is language, memory, and belonging. Each mark made with natural pigments embodies ancestral knowledge, a cultural code that communicates identity, social role, and connection to the cycles of life.
The artist draws inspiration from the myth of Nungulli — the feminine spirit of fertility and agriculture — to evoke a matrilineal wisdom passed down through bodies and gestures. Before planting, women paint their skin in acts of gratitude and hope, forming alliances with the invisible. These signs become drawn prayers — intimate traces of communication with nature.
In Nina’s focused expression and contemplative gesture, symbolic and narrative elements converge: resistance, care, and the threshold between the visible and the invisible. The layered use of oil, pastels, and gold leaf enhances the material depth of memory, lending a sense of sacred presence that transcends portraiture.
Quello che la pelle ricorda (2025), is part of the serie dedicated to the dignity and strength of Indigenous women of the Amazon.
This painting not only restores visibility to silenced knowledge, but invites viewers to slow down, to observe with reverence, and to listen to what survives beneath the surface.
