Visual artist and scenographer — Maria Magdalena David has developed a practice rooted in the design of spaces, immersive installations and soundscapes, either autonomous or conceived for exhibitions and fashion shows. Trained in fine arts and scenography at the Pavillon Bosio in Monaco, she explores the sensitive relationships between the body, movement and space. Her creations, whether in the form of artworks, exhibition scenography or fashion show displays, question the very frameworks of display, producing spaces that are both autonomous and expansive, traversed by the presence of the spectator.
Temporality plays a decisive role in her work – the visitor’s journey or the duration of the fashion show become a tangible material, allowing for the metamorphosis of atmospheres, the mutation of environments and their gradual transformation through light, sound or the actions of the models, performers and the audience itself. In these shifting universes, time unfolds, contracts and suspends itself; it becomes a scenographic material in its own right.
Maria Magdalena’s work is nourished by meticulous attention to the residues, fragments, subtle and organic debris that populate our everyday environment. These elements, which she collects, diverts or amplifies, become the foundations of a scenographic space that does not merely show, but re-enacts, in constant dialogue with the architecture, the light and the audience.
The spaces she designs are imbued with a deliberate ambivalence: their apparent formal clarity conceals underlying tensions between the objects on display and those viewing them. They invite an unstable perception, oscillating between comfort and discomfort, familiarity and strangeness.
Maria Magdalena invents atmospheres – in both the meteorological and sensory sense – in fashion show spaces as well as exhibition spaces. She plunges the viewer into a state of acute attention, where space ceases to be a simple setting and becomes an experience, an environment to inhabit, to experience, to roam.