FLOWERS FOR MAA

This work begins with a simple, intimate gesture: the offering of flowers to a Mother. From this personal thought, Nastrè expands the gesture until "Maa" becomes unstable, plural and universal. 
"Maa" operates throughout the exhibition as both intimate address and cultural construction. Beneath the abundance of flowers, scents, reflections and objects lies a void which the exhibition repeatedly approaches as a space that cannot be represented directly: the imagined moment before identity, before language, before the body becomes an image of itself since behind every image of wholeness there always remains something missing, the flower emerges from this absence.


While the origin of Flowers for Maa is personal, the exhibition's ambition is not autobiography

Nastrè takes an intimate thought; an impulse to offer flowers to "Maa" and stretches it outward until it encounters questions of gender, identity, belonging, nation, desire, memory, bureaucracy, embodiment and absence.

The personal becomes a threshold through which the universal can be approached. 
The exhibition asks: 
Who taught us how to recognise ourselves?
What do we inherit before we can choose?
What do we offer back to the place from which we believe we came?
What remains when the flower has been given?
And most importantly, what is the materiality of that which blooms in this void?

Through this work, Nastre creates an apparatus of rememberance; one that asks the visitor to move through the liminal without judgement but with awareness and observe what emerges