Nina Carini is an artist with her feet anchored in her own time and with her eyes turned to the sky. She comes from painting, but she switches very quickly to new forms of artistic expression, more fluid and three-dimensional, like performance and video. 2010 is a crucial year for her: seeing the six majestic Louise Bourgeoise's engravings, I give everything away, marks a before and after in her artistic career. From then on, the themes of identity and image become a permanent presence in her research, declining themselves from time to time in the use of word and language and in the search for an intimate communication.

Born in Palermo and then moved to the North of Italy, Nina carries with her the sprouts of conceptual art which blossoms in unprecedented forms of art, more visceral and related to body language. For her, performance are experiments because they represent the form with which she tries to give an answer to the existential questions that torment her and which come at the end of long periods of research. Psychology, sciology, art, theatre and cinema: this is Nina's intellectual and visual heritage, from which she draws from time to time, setting tones which are new and nostalgic at the same time. That is how we can see Tadeusz Kantor in the conducting of the mannequin-men (J'ai Peur, 2017) or the Nouvelle Vague, Michelangelo Antonioni and David Lynch in the spatial and sound management and in the lack of communication between human beings (Divine Astrazioni, 2017).

Authentic -and still unpublished- example of Nina Carini's creative development is Nature Inanimée (2014). A question to start: why it's hard to recognise ourselves when we look in the mirror? Long studies have taken place, from Renée Zazzo to Claude Cahun, on self-portrait and on the concept of the mask. The actorial mask and language are in fact fundamental in the process of growth of the artist, who doesn't surrender to the idea of finding the possibility of communication and intimate relationship among human beings, to the point where in her last works it is the voice that dominates the field of this possibility, while the body stays in the background. Guided by Chiara Guidi's studies on voice and sound, Carmelo Bene, and all sound poetry, the voice becomes the last and extreme chance to undermine the conflicts of image and to preserve the identity that men are not able to cure.

That is how the research on relationship and communication among people lands on the study of language, a fluid passage during which it is the sound that fills space, and space becomes social, increased relationship between internal and external space. If the historic moment gives in to the ubiquity of individual listening through suitable devices, shared acoustic spaces become even rarer. By approaching the subject from different perspectives, Nina sees a disconnection between the

neurological structure of language, according to which “every time that two words combine by virtue of some trait, a dependence is established between them” (Andrea Moro, Le Lingue Impossibili, 2017) and its primary communicative function. Actually, the risk is that language might even create misunderstanding until the sad conclusion that “nobody knows how to communicate with others”, as Zygmunt Bauman writes quoting Sharon Zukin. To complicate the matter, the discourse on form immersed in the dimension of dialogue comes in, what it is and if it is compatible with content, especially in the light of modernist aesthetic. In this respect, Nina's view is aligned with that of Serge Daney, for whom today's art, differently from an object closed in itself, shows that meeting is the indispensable condition for form. In the face of this relentless estrangement from every communication form capable of generating encounters, for Nina Carini it is just as if such possibility is instead firmly anchored somewhere in the world, but perhaps it is only hidden by a sort of veil of Maya waiting to be moved aside. Through Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nina sees poetry as a way out, because here the word becomes a symbol of something else, it is music wanting to be listened to with unawareness and which requires innocence. In Wystan Hugh Auden, poetry even becomes a dam containing the meaning which tends to escape from the word, far away.

Filled with this thoughts Nina then asks herself, if words are so fragile that they get empty and fall, how can dialogue between two people happen? (Confine, 2017) In imagining a site-specific work, the artist came up with creating an “abstract” and infinite sentence which gave voice to all these people, and to do so she used the words obtained as answers to a question posed to people who were going in and out of the subway: what is the word you think you use more often during the day? (I confini di Babele, 2018) In this way Nina wanted to establish an intimate and authentic contact with the speaker, giving to voice the main role and transforming the repeated word in a sort of mantra. If in the first work where Nina introduced sound, Analphabeta (2017), “the will is that of proposing the difficulty of who is learning to speak” (Angela Madesani), today language in her research takes a different maturity, an awareness of its being misleading even as an adult, as a native speaker, but that at the same time and unwillingly looks for forms of gathering. This for Nina Carini can happen in art, and her work is a manifestation of such evolution.