Since 2019, artist Rachele Maistrello has been developing The Diamond Saga, first conceived during a residency at I:project space and later expanded at Inside Out Museum, Beijing. Structured for now in three chapters (Green Diamond, Blue Diamond, and Black Diamond), the project explores the relationship between humans and nature through the fictional alter ego Gao Yue, blurring the boundaries between truth and falsification.
Black Diamond, still in its research phase, marks a crucial moment in Maistrello's journey. Non-places such as offices and waiting rooms, familiar from earlier works, now acquire darker tones, evoking emptiness and rupture. Silhouettes interrupt daily routine, shifting the gaze into a dreamlike register. Amid piles of papers, desks, and office supplies, labyrinthine caves and hushed landscapes emerge. These stratified spaces evoke a descent into the psyche, where hidden corridors hold the deepest memories. Geological layers mirror emotional ones, suggesting that every trauma – visible or invisible – carries both the persistence of the past and the possibility of transformation. Within this metaphorical landscape, the human body itself becomes terrain: layered, resilient, and vulnerable.
In dialogue with Antonie Angerer, Anna-Viktoria Eschbach and Sonja Zagermann, the artist elaborate on her use of photography as a channel to re-signify reality, hovering between the scientific and the dreamlike and experimenting with the darkroom, parallel to her focus on text, printed matter, and books as important elements of storytelling.The exchange reflects on the ethics of research-based art, the circulation of images in book form, and the ways in which publishing can act as an extension of artistic practice.
The event Black Diamond is part of Rachele Maistrello's research project, ‘The Diamond Project. Chapter III’ granted by the Italian Council program (13th edition, 2024) and promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
