Life—and the twists and turns that come with it—is the gold thread that runs through Marione’s work.
the art of reinventing and realizing, the many lives of Marione Matta The first sculpture she ever created, titled Mutilated, explores the emotions she felt after an operation to remove her uterus: as though there was a hole in the middle of her. Her piece The Aboriginal was an homage to an Aboriginal person assassinated by the Australian police in the northern territory. “The worst racism I saw in my life was in Australia,” Marione says. “In the US, I experienced racism; you could see easily that white and black people hated each other. But in Australia, white and Aboriginal people ignore each other—which might be even worse.” Each of Marione’s works is connected to a distinct experience from her life, which took her across the globe in her search for pleasure, fulfillment, and beauty. Marione Matta’s origins were very humble, but through love and education the whole world opened up to her. As her foster mother often says, Marione was not a “foster child“(filha de criação), but a child of the heart, (filha de coração).
At eighteen, as an exchange student in the US for a school year she found a new family with whom she remains in contact. The experience taught her a pivotal lesson that she could explore all the possibilities that the world had to offer her. Upon returning to Brazil she acquired her first medical degree and completed two years of residency. She was then invited by the university hospital of Zurich for a year’s fellowship. In Switzerland she completed another medical degree, and after her schooling she began work with the Swiss Air rescue service, Rega, as an international flying doctor. When Swiss citizens got into accidents abroad— heart attacks in Africa, broken legs in the US, surfing accidents in Australia—they were transported on commercial flights or small jets of the company with a captain, a co-pilot, a nurse, and Marione, who cared for them all the way home. It was a flying intensive care unit.
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