Marica Marinoni was born in Milan in the last days of October 1995.
Daughter of an architect father and an artisan mother, she was raised with a vision of life strongly influenced by artistic and expressive practices, which led her to develop a deep interest in applied arts. Alongside this artistic sensibility, Marica showed a particular aptitude and interest in sport. After trying several disciplines, she became passionate about trampoline, which she practiced competitively for seven years.
At the beginning of adolescence, tired of spending long afternoons in the gym, Marica became convinced that her future would not be limited to the trampoline and decided to focus on her studies. For five years, she immersed herself in drawing, painting, illustration, sculpture, and art history. In addition, thanks to her mother, who is a language graduate, she was encouraged to travel extensively across Europe to achieve a good level of English and to learn French and Spanish.
At sixteen, driven by the need to find work, she began teaching acrobatics and trampoline at the Zero Gravity gym in Milan. This allowed her to meet acrobats who invited her to take part in the “Extreme Convention” in Antwerp.
From that moment on, her encounter with circus became inevitable and decisive. It gradually entered her life, first through social circus projects in Romania and Bosnia, and then through amateur training.
At the end of her studies, Marica completely changed her academic plans and decided to enroll at the FLIC Scuola di Circo, where she chose Cyr wheel as her main discipline. She fell deeply in love with the apparatus and never really left it, except occasionally, when she joined a group bascule project where she learned the basics of the discipline.
After two years of intensive work, she successfully passed the selection for the Centre national des arts du cirque, entering the first year of the program. At the same time, she began collaborating with the company “Feel the Universe” in the Czech Republic, where she created a Cyr wheel duo with Sebastian Krefeld (from the same CNAC cohort) and performed a bascule act for two years.
Finally, still inspired by the works of Juan Ignacio Tula and Stefan Kinsman, during the following two years of her higher education, Marica focused on her personal artistic research around the relationship between herself and the Cyr wheel, seeking to invent new lines and forms and to develop a unique way of inhabiting the apparatus.
She embodies her relationship to the Cyr wheel. She identifies with a sometimes “brutal” approach, in contrast with the smoothness of the wheel, pushing physical and technical limits that gradually lead her to discover new approaches and new relationships to the apparatus.
Currently, she is also developing a duo project with English artist Charlie Wheeler, who also works with the Cyr wheel, in order to further explore this apparatus.
In addition, together with four classmates from her cohort—Hector Diaz Mallea, Pablo Peñailillo, Fernando Arevalo Casado, and Maël Thierry—driven by a shared desire to work together, they formed a small company called CMR (maximum breaking load), with which they hope to continue creating and working in the near future.