Interview with Margherita Cavallo
Margherita Cavallo (Osimo, 1944), architect and artist based in Milan, taught Architectural Design in art schools for over forty years before fully devoting herself to art in 2015. Drawing, along with artist’s books and installations, is her most immediate language: a means of transforming thought and imagination into visual storytelling. Her works address existential, social, and environmental issues through a surreal and grotesque vision, suspended like a dream beyond time and space. Since 2017, she has exhibited in solo and group shows; with La Cura (Fondazione Tufano, Milan 2025), she reinterprets tarantism as a symbolic and therapeutic rite, reaffirming art, music, and dance as healing practices rooted in Mediterranean culture.
“Sono una creatura” is the work that, after being selected among the 13 finalists of the 2025 Comel Award, received the Special Mention of the Jury for its “loose formal, visual, and allusive versatility.” Do you feel that this recognition reflects your creative intent?
I recognize myself in the jury’s motivations, to which I would add—referring to the characteristics of the materials used (aluminium for the figure and plexiglass for the support)—the formal and perceptive fluidity resulting both from their reflective qualities and their plastic ones (malleability and ductility, as well as the minimal thickness of the aluminium sheet that prevails over physicality). I also agree with the allusive aspect, as the work suggests but does not define. The indeterminacy of the title “Sono una creatura” invites free interpretation regardless of the context in which it was conceived and created.
The work, shaped from a sheet of aluminium, depicts a body caught in rapid movement. Legs and arms seem to multiply in a balance that conveys constant dynamism. Where did the idea for this work originate?
Created in 2025, the work is part of a multidisciplinary artistic and cultural project titled LA CURA. Il ragno della follia (THE CURE. The Spider of Madness), begun in 2019, shortly before the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, and concluded in November 2025 with a large installation at the Tufano Foundation in Milan—an architecturally and spatially suitable place to evoke the tiny chapel of Galatina (LE) dedicated to Saint Paul, protector of the “tarantati.”
The aim of the project, which involved various professional figures, was to restore to tarantism—an ancient ritual phenomenon of Southern Italy that afflicted men and women working in the fields during the harvest season, and recognized as a practice of liberation and transformation of individual and collective pain—its original essence and to update its symbolic and therapeutic significance.
Powerful is the reference to the archetypal figure of the tarantula, which bites and poisons but at the same time triggers a healing process through movement, music, sound, and the body—a metaphor for the wounds of the soul, for madness as a passage, and for ritual as a tool to regain lost balance.
Enriched over time by contributions from disciplines such as music, dance, photography, anthropology, and art therapy, the project explored new ways of reactivating the ritual gesture, restoring to tarantism its archetypal, sacred, and therapeutic value, still capable of speaking to the present.
Paraphrasing Ernesto De Martino, the creature represents the exhausted “tarantato” in the final act of the musical, choreutic, chromatic exorcism.
LA CURA– The Spider of Madness (installation) Photo by Alessia Montanari
The technique highlights the ability to harmonize a sensitive listening to the material—its spontaneous movements—with careful structural planning. Technically, what were the stages of creating the work?
I reproduced the pencil drawing of the figure at a 1:10 scale on a sheet of aluminium. After cutting out the outline, I shaped it. A specialized company laser-cut a 200 x 200 cm aluminium sheet with a thickness of 1.5 mm. The shaping was carried out by my trusted blacksmith, Lorenzo Cerchierini, without the use of tools.
The transparent plexiglass support becomes an essential part of the work, creating a sense of suspension. What is the relationship between aluminium and plexiglass? Have you used these materials together before? What is your relationship with aluminium?
In the case of “Sono una creatura,” plexiglass came to my aid as a less invasive support. For three-dimensional works, I regularly use aluminium sheets and often engrave their surfaces. When I need to print my drawings onto the surface of a work, I use various types of PVC sheets (for the installation I used a micro-perforated PVC sheet) or acetate sheets up to 100 x 150 cm, which I treat with different manual techniques.
Transparent, printable PVC has body and a certain flexibility, while the micro-perforated material is used like a fabric. The possibility of being shaped—albeit differently—and their responsiveness to the effects produced by different types of lighting are the qualities that unite the two materials.
To build the installation LA CURA – Il ragno della follia, I used all these materials and, to allow light to filter through, I renounced printing in white. The figures, true mobiles thanks to the lightness of aluminium, hung from the ceiling and moved, creating ever-changing shadows on the walls and ceiling.
In my work, and even more specifically in this project, the projected shadow plays a crucial role. It is not merely the result of aesthetic or formal research. It represents unconscious parts of the personality that the conscious Self rejects, denies, or does not recognize in itself—and often projects onto others.
LA CURA– The Spider of Madness (installation) Photo by Alessia Montanari
The theme of this year’s Comel Award was “Strength.” In what way do you feel your work expressed this concept?
Rather than Strength, I would speak of the strengths of aluminium, which are unique among the most commonly used metals. The lightness of the material allowed me to make the figures whirl in the air, suspended from invisible nylon threads, and to dematerialize them thanks to their mirror-like surfaces.
In your artistic journey, recurring themes include marginality and what are commonly defined as mental or character imbalances. When and why did these themes become part of your work?
The essence of my work lies in storytelling, and drawing is the medium I prefer. My works address existential themes, social and environmental issues, balanced on the razor’s edge of a surreal, almost grotesque imagination.
In his commentary on the 1962 documentary La tarantula by Franco Mingozzi, curated by E. De Martino, the poet Quasimodo opens with this sentence: “This is the land of Puglia and Salento. Here, in the heat, emerges the spider of madness and absence.”
The spider is therefore a metaphor that represents—both positively and negatively—one of the most recognized archetypes of the collective unconscious. The world of the spider is a world of madness where the Self is absent; it is the world of creativity without rules, as in dreams where anything is possible.
C.G. Jung states that creativity resides in the Self, the place where the world of the Ego meets the wild world of the unconscious. In this illuminating thought lies the greatness and effectiveness of the exorcistic ritual, which helps the “tarantato” encounter their own unconscious in order to know themselves.
And I, while waiting to give convincing meaning to my existence, embrace the thesis of philosopher Umberto Galimberti. Like all living beings, I consider myself functional to Mother Nature and, within the time granted to me, like the spiders I fear and love, I am and will be engaged in weaving, mending, and reweaving the web of my life.
LA CURA– The Spider of Madness (installation) Photo by Alessia Montanari
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