How do you describe your own art practice?
A serious invitation to play.
Dancing, 2019
Installation view at Almanac Inn, Turin
Photo by Sebastiano Pellion
Which question or theme is central in your work?
The basis is a desire to share an imaginative space with other people. An intimate contact, mediated by the works. Perceiving that my work reverberates in someone’s depths is one of the most satisfying sensations as an author. Art has this power and keeping it in mind is a central issue for me. Said that, various themes recur in my research including seeing and being seen, liminality, mimicry, the body as an environment and tool, water and the feminine. Lately I have been reflecting on fear and its normalisation.
Urpe, Daboia, Taipan, Oropel, Petra, Ige, Vlada, Cinna, Nisia 2013- 2015
mixed media on ropes, sound piece in collaboration with Federico Chiari
Installation view at Thermae of Como Archeological Site, 2016
What was your first experience with art?
When I was a child, I used to filter reality through fantastic visions and scenarios of my own invention. Bringing people onto my fantasy field made it easier for me to deal with them. In addition, I often impersonated a witch, engaging in spells that sometimes worked. Basically, I haven’t stopped since.
Hydria, 2019
Hand dyed cotton canvas, scagliola carpigiana sculpture
10 x 2,7 m and 23 x 19 x 17,5 cm
Photo by Silvia Mangosio and Luca Vianello
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
Whatever tickles a certain combination of spots in my brain at the same time. It can be literally anything.
Fon Gran Papa I, 2019
Dental ceramic plaster, clay sediments
28 x 64 x 25 cm
Photo by Silvia Mangosio and Luca Vianello
What do you need in order to create your work?
I need to feel good. I have never found pain or torment fertile and if I’m not okay, putting together something worthwhile is a struggle. If I’m in the right mood tho, I can literally take other people on an art trip just moving my hands.
Untitled, from the series Handled Sculptures, 2014
Inkjet print on cotton paper
28 x 42 cm
What work or artist has most recently surprised you?
I’ve recently bumped into André Kertész’s impressive catalog of photographs. I knew his most famous shots, but I had never before grasped the author’s work as a whole and to learn more about him has been an exciting experience. The ability to be surprised by the appearance of things and of making the banalest subjects seem unprecedented just thanks to a certain light, a certain refined perspective, a compositional finesse (in a nutshell: a point of view) is one of the characteristics that I personally appreciate the most in an ar1st. In the immediacy of the shot, Kertész’s photography expresses this sensitivity in a way that moves me. May sound paradoxical, especially in this day and age, but I really think that photography lived in this way may be seen as an “amplifier” of the experience of reality. Also, it’s a striking example that in the field of art ‘the how’ is infinitely more important than ‘the what’.
Untitled (half face), 2019
Raku ceramics 26.3 x 14 x 19 cm
Photo by Silvia Mangosio and Luca Vianello
