IIIIIII STEPS

For a total of seven days, Margherita Chiarva has walked seven steps in the Atacama Desert, three times a day – at dawn, at the zenith, and at sunset. For each step, she took a photograph and collected a desert rock, each one has been placed on a canvas soaked with cyanotype, symbolizing all of the 148 steps taken during the days of this performance.
Heritage of a mental game she used to play since childhood, “if you arrive at that point in seven steps, then this thing might happen”, this ritual takes inspiration from a principle that regulates the universe, a system where everything is energy, ourselves included.
According to this theory, the events of life are created through our intentions: it is our attitude and mental disposition, which lead us to a positive predisposition towards what it is we want to achieve, and make it so that we attract it towards us.
Einstein had already talked of how everything that exists is made up of energy, a universal vibration that travels on specific frequencies with which we can align ourselves. Like praying, this ritual is a way to address our thoughts to a higher entity.
Through this symbolic ritual carried out by Margherita Chiarva with 7 steps, the image becomes the medium between the expressed will and the universe, like a mantra transmuted into a photographic act. A psycho-magical act where the desert is a natural extension of the Body’s internal silence. This is why it’s frightful. Only by traversing ourselves can we traverse the desert. And vice versa. With few steps. But symbolic. Profound. Delicate. Intense. Like the 7 steps that Margherita has dedicated to just as many intents, in a performative and symbolic feat carried out in the Atacama desert ,fighting, losing, questioning herself, and finding herself once more.

Link to exhibition : https://www.pastificiocerere.it/mostre-attivita/margherita-chiarva-7-steps/