‘Each time I leave this place,’ says Marina Collard, ‘I get asked the same question: “And when will you return?”’ While Here is a temporal conjuring trick – a series of works arising in response to the landscape of the Alpi Apuane and an adjacent community, which the artist has visited time and again over a span of 27 years. ‘Here’, then, expands to encompass a memorialised past, sensate present and imagined future. It enmeshes the elemental realities of a forbidding and bountiful environment – storm-felled trees; metamorphic rocks – with the quotidian physical labours and ancestral ties of a gradually vanishing village population. The artworks in While Here refuse to operate as ‘landscape paintings’ in any traditional sense. They break forth in sweeps of teal, umber, turquoise – fluid patterns disrupted now and then by the trace of a figure, the sole of a foot, or the arc of a pencil-drawn spine. Rather than a legible topography unspooling towards the viewer, the eye is drawn inwards, to the responsorial foundation of these works. An underlying core of human activity which led to their production; rituals of walking, touching, eavesdropping. A body lost to an environment. The deployment of environment as a world in which to lose the body is a thematic found repeatedly across Collard’s work. Whether folded double, painstakingly traversing the expanse of Venice’s Piazza San Marco, step by step and heel to toe (Chalkwalk, 2023) or running, leaping and twisting inside the wooded terrain of (her long-term collaborator) Tom Paine’s films (Still Going, 2014), Collard is instinctively responsive to her surroundings. With While Here, she marshals that instinct in an explicit, deliberate way. Over repeated visits spanning two years, the artist traced traditional walking paths between villages; allowing herself to become disorientated, absorbing the textures, contours, smells and temperatures of the environment. Collard intuits that the people who live and work in this region possess a distinct embodied knowledge of the landscape. ‘It’s as if’, she says, ‘the landscape is a part of your skin or your veins. And I think that knowledge is very beautiful. I – as a visitor – don’t have it. I can’t navigate this landscape in that way’. For the artist, being unable to navigate like a local offers a means of surrendering entirely to the sensorial potentials of the forest tracks, the moss- covered trees, the wide expanse. There is a playful inversion at work in these forays as she painstakingly retraces ancient tracks. These paths are sites of historical labour – remnants of the workaday realities of what it is to live life in an unforgiving rural environment – chopping wood by hand, hauling logs, walking miles to exchange goods. Once maintained meticulously – swept by hand – by the (mostly) women who walked them, the paths are slowly being obliterated by the encroaching vegetation and trees. When Collard speaks of traversing them –mapping the landscape and the fragmented communal histories which it secretes – she describes clambering, sliding and being interrupted. No longer functional as efficient byways, Collard’s ritualistic negotiation of them becomes ludic and, conversely, melancholic. Ludic, in the sense that she fears she might appear to the passerby as ‘behaving in a childlike way – of navigating the landscape as if it were a playground’. But the interruptions she encounters and the contortions which she performs, of stooping, crouching, shinnying, become emblems of loss. Signalling the palpable perception of a village population continually shrinking, of elders who carry tacit memories of utilitarian rural life within them, vanishing one by one. An element of displacement is central to While Here. As an artist with familial and historical ties to the area, it is both ‘home’ to Collard and, due to the strictures of her time-limited visits, definitively ‘not home’. Governed always by departures and returns. The unhomely permeates the artworks; via the fragmentation and multiple viewpoints of sun- dappled woods, forest roads and passersby, which feature in Collard’s film installation, or the paintings’ continued refusal to faithfully reconstitute the landscape from which they arise. They are not cosy or bucolic. This refusal of representative fidelity may, in Collard’s words, ‘fail some degree of expectation on the part of the viewer, but this is the only way I can meet it. It is the only way I can be honest. What I’ve tried to do is to embody or reveal through the paintings, some of the sensorial connection I feel – they have a degree of intimacy – you’re not sure if it’s guts or body or landscape that you’re looking at. For me, there isn’t much distinction between the body of the landscape and the physical body. I think of the skin as a threshold, but a very porous one.’ Dislocation, threshold and rupture feel resonant in the context of a region which has witnessed generations of emigration – cyclical losses and occasional homecomings turning over like seasons. ‘And when will you return?’ is a question that runs in the bloodlines of this place and, by extension, through Collard’s response to it. The cascade of severed snapshots, for example, of the social gatherings in the village which she has attended – a wedding, a birthday party, a shared meal. Spliced, now, to form a curtain which falls through the stairwell of the Fondazione Ricci. Mementos, irreparably fractured and out of time. Suspended in the air. The fragmentation at work throughout the exhibition gestures to the ongoing metamorphosis which the surrounding natural and human environments are subject to, visible through the windows of the Fondazione. Before now, while here, and onwards to the future. Constant flux and the implicitly acknowledged inability to pin down the moment as it is, or as it was. Only how it is remembered. Still felt in the body as a touch or a tremor, an image filling the eye, a long exhale deflating the ribcage. The partiality of memory and the inevitability of forgetting are constant companions in the encounters which While Here offers. The paintings are ambitious – at times almost fantastical – akin to landscapes rendered as they might appear in dreams. But crucially, they are not romantic. Just as they evade true-to-life illustration, so too do they reject any saccharine eulogising of the pastoral. The ordinary, the relational, the poetic, the sensorial: these elements are held gently together like acorns hidden in a child’s palm. Humans living, walking, eating and grieving in interdependent relation to the landscape which envelops them. Gifted by its bounty and subject, always, to its variability. The things that endure and the things which gradually disappear.