Artist Highlight - Cement Blanche

1. In the “Coffee for Three” series, everyday objects appear both familiar and unsettling. What role does ambiguity play in shaping how viewers approach these forms?

Coffee time is almost a ritual in my family and I guess in a lot of Italian families, but also in other social contexts, from work environment to old friends’ meetings or between people who just met each other. It’s a kind of symbol of mutual exchange in everyday life, an unwritten appointment to share time and thoughts, so I couldn’t start from anything else to talk about communication, from a small but emotionally deep scale, it came quite natural to me. At the same time, for each person, every single exchange of thoughts, attitudes or gazes is read and measured in a peculiar and unique way, due to personal experiences, feelings in that specific moment, learnt social rules and other uncountable reasons that make each of us who we are. That’s why I decided to approach very common and known shapes for everyone, as an unusual perception experience, to underline this contrast.

2. The work replaces the measurable idea of weight with its metaphorical meaning. How do the materials and forms communicate this shift from physical weight to emotional or psychological weight?

It's a sort of metonymy between the coffee poured by someone into someone else's cup and the message, the words that that gesture conveys. I played with both the positive and negative figurative meaning of the word weight: on one side how much something matters, how much we believe in something, how much we care about it, the political, ethical and last but not least, especially the sentimental value we attribute to it; on the other side, previous experiences can be burdens we carry with us and can contribute to shape the reading that we have of something, they become part of our

identity and of our way of relating to the world, by transforming the importance, the weight, we attribute to the things that make up the world itself.

3. The sculptures are made from lightweight foam rubber, yet they visually reference heavier materials such as cement. How important is this contrast between appearance and material reality?

I’ve always had doubts about what reality really is, and it’s not just a wordplay even if it sounds a bit like a cliché, I think that there is a different reality for each perceived reality. This was my main concern. The aesthetics of concrete have always fascinated me, in all the forms in which art or architecture has used it, especially when its solid structure is visible from outside and its materic surface become the final finishing without anything else to be added. The physical composition of concrete also recalls a myriad of mirrors embedded in it, a compound of infinite projections and external readings of the same substance crystallized in it. This was the perfect solution to me to express the contrast with a so fragile and malleable subject in continuous transformation for each of us. This is how the shift happened: soft and light if you touch it and carry it in your hands, rigid and heavy at first sight. It’s also an attempt to give lightness and breath to real life or only perceived heavy stuffs.

4. Numbers indicating the objects’ weight are impressed directly onto their surfaces. What do these labels reveal about how value or meaning is assigned in social interactions?

The contrast between a solid material like cement and an ephemeral one like foam rubber has also another reason behind. If every time we talk to each other, we could forget about the idea we have in our mind about the person in front of us and we were more open to a new perspective on the topic under discussion, the resulting communication would be completely different from the initial label we have put on it. The nature of these objects is deliberately transitory, occasional, for temporary installations, not written in stone (or cement, also called artificial stone), their finishing is not stable (it can’t last forever identical because of the porose material which gradually absorbs the color unpredictably) and their meaning are open, can be different in the next “encounter”, as much as interpersonal communications and relationships can be. The given label about their weight is actually a reminder of the lability of those numbers.

5. Your practice draws from fashion, costume, and performance. In what ways do these disciplines influence the staging or presence of the objects in space?

I can't help but imagine everything I create in a space to be inhabited, with its own atmosphere, probably sound as well as visual. In reality, it's not easy for me to see them still rather than in relation to a moving body, and that's often how I present them, an exhibition is a frozen moment which evokes a whole performance in my mind.