“I consider any poetic image, that breaks our normal imagination and creates hope, a form of rebellion against central power. I consider it powerful and perturbing to be able to raise and form a child so that it conserves and safeguards marvel as a subversive thought. To bring back hope to the future that is to be, to the body of the fireflies and to the new generations, is a subversive action.
I am interested in the sense of responsibility, which I put in the children’s hands, in their firm belief in their visions and in their ideas of the future. The action contains a profound sense of education, of the idea of the performance as a magical and necessary act. I believe in a utopia-in-the-making as a social objective, even if it remains a wonderful and intangible, incomprehensible product.
This act, however minimal, contains a necessary fracture with time.”
Francesca Grilli
Francesca Grilli is an Italian artist currently based in Bruxelles. Her research vibrates in two fields: visual art and performing art. She uses a multidisciplinary language where the performance flows between visual art spaces to performing festivals, with a special attention to sound in all its forms and registers.
Grilli has developed several projects around the concept of the resistant body. In the earlier performative projects the body was engaged as a reflection of the resistance to life, to time, to decline, in spite of everything and for everything. In these last works, the resistant body gives in to or struggles against the concept of being consumed. Present in every artwork is in fact a disappearance, which is the result of an action contained in the work itself. She explores the realm of sound her works move from private and personal elements into spectators' space of action, drawing them into an ambiguous and unsettling territory.
Her work has been exhibited in many internationals venues such as Palais De Tokyo (2017), Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (2015-2017), Azione – Interazione at MAXXI Museum in Rome (2016), viceversa - Italian Pavillon at 55th Biennale di Venezia (2013), MADRE Museo d'arte contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples (2012), Serpentine Gallery, London (2010) and Manifesta7 in Bolzano (2008). She has also participated in numerous performance festivals including: Santarcangelo Festival (2017- 2019), Kunsthalle Osnabrueck, Germany (2017), O museu como performance at Serralves Foundation, PT (2017), Homo Novus Festival in Riga (2016), Drodesera Festival (2006/2017), Romaeuropa Festival (2011), Rencontres chorégraphiques in Paris (2010).
Francesca Grilli is currently an Associated Artist of Santarcangelo Festival 2017-2019.
www.francescagrilli.com
