about.

STUDIO STEFANIA MISCETTI is delighted to present The Meatseller. Frames, a solo exhibition of work by director and animator MARGHERITA GIUSTI.
Giusti returns to the gallery with a new project after presenting her short film Innatura (2021) as the opening piece of the 12th edition of SHE DEVIL, the gallery’s yearly review of video work. First seen at the MAXXI Museum in 2021, Innatura was subsequently shown at the Studio Miscetti in 2022, followed by a presentation at the international biennial BIENALSUR in 2023. This time Giusti offers us a story at once visceral and tender, a journey of personal emancipation that unfolds and is revealed through the body, in all its animal, female nature.

The exhibition features a selection of more than 20 works of acrylic on paper, which Giusti made over the course of 2022 for her animated short The Meatseller (2023). The film, which Giusti directed, was produced by Luca Guadagnino’s Frenesy Film Company and presented at the 2023 Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti (‘Horizons’) category. The painted works immerse us in the story of the film’s young female protagonist, Selinna Ajamikoko, whom Giusti met in 2022 through Margherita D’Andrea, a social worker at the SPRAR in Rome, an organisation set up to protect asylum seekers and refugees.

After spending more than a year conducting interviews, writing the screenplay, creating the storyboard, and editing the film with Emmanuel Bonomi, Giusti began pre-production in September 2022 with her colleagues Elisa Bonandin, Elisabetta Bosco, Viola Mancini from the MUTA animation collective. Full production then began with a larger group of female animators, and with Enrico Ascoli weaving the original score and sound design into Selinna‘s first-person narration.

The works on display are all inspired by The Meatseller’s most striking and only hand-drawn scene. The film itself was made using a hybrid technique that brings together both analogue and digital technologies, and which favours the use of paper for the story’s most important symbolic and material elements.

The opening night of the exhibition will include two screenings of The Meatseller (2023, 17’) at 19:30 and 20:30, marking the film’s first showing in Rome.

Selinna’s story is true. It’s the story of a girl transforming into a woman and fearlessly overcoming the obstacles that stand in her way, with the clarity of the dream she carries within providing the drive to do so. Through her account I wanted to express something of the wild, visceral strength that exists in every woman: that primal, animal energy that shakes things up, that enables us to rise from the ashes and look to the future with curiosity, as part of the ongoing discovery of the world that continues with every step we take.

MARGHERITA GIUSTI

artist.

more exhibition.

more exhibitions by MARGHERITA GIUSTI with STUDIO STEFANIA MISCETTI.