Out of Maya is a journey that started from my desire to work on the controversial and deeply fascinating figure of Maya Deren: poet, filmmaker, director and artist, active in New York in the '40s.

I wanted to start from the intellectual Deren: the writer, the filmmaker. By watching her movies, studying her research materials and reading her essays, I tried to understand her way of working and the direction that her experimental filmmaking took.

In turn, I tried to experiment and create a new vision of her - looking for a new point of view to describe her personality that oscillated between the mystical and the religious, the exotic and the suspended.

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The goal was reconstructing her deepest identity, without putting some label on it, but rather by leaving it in a free and creative space, ‘out of time'.

The end result is a book/map, my personal vision of Maya Deren.

I worked on original pictures that I received from the Maya Deren archives at the Boston University and I used collage techniques to try and express  her way of being a woman, unconventional and experimental Director and Performer.

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Project designed and created by Valentina Granello