4.0435° S, 39.6682° N - The Birth of a Vision

Show & Culture

The exhibition dedicated to Mariko, artistic name of Florence Combescure, unfolds as a mental cartography in which Africa, Asia, and Europe converge within a singular symbolic space. In her sculptural practice, travel is understood as a continuous inner migration through memory, culture, and imagination. Visions overlap, identities dissolve, and hybrid forms emerge, suspended between multiple worlds. The conceptual point of origin lies in Mombasa, Kenya, where, as a child, the artist encountered clay through the Maasai community and created her first sculpture. From this experience emerged an artistic language in which matter becomes a place of cultural and imaginative transformation. Mariko’s works never belong to a single tradition. The archaic and totemic power of African art intertwines with the restrained tension of Eastern aesthetics and the plastic sensibility of European sculpture, generating figures that resist fixed categorisation. It is in this fusion that her work finds coherence: a visual language capable of uniting monumentality and delicacy, ritual and contemporaneity, ancestral memory and modern imagination. Female figures traverse her work as evolving archetypes: the primordial and ritual African woman; the Japanese geisha, suspended between discipline and mystery; the introspective European figure; and the distant echo of the American cinema icon — embodiment of fascination, performance, and constructed identity. These presences merge within the sculptures, becoming a singular and universal figure beyond borders or cultural definitions. Ceramic, bronze, terracotta, and metallic elements participate in this dialogue between distant worlds. Dark and textured surfaces evoke a material language where archaic memory and contemporary sensibility coexist in tension. "The Birth of a Vision" unfolds not as a linear narrative but as a constellation of connections, where each sculpture becomes a point of intersection between continents, cultures, and imaginings. For Mariko, art is the space in which these geographies converge, dissolve, and take form through matter.