8.DOGS.10, 2019, performance-installation, performers: Fons Dhossche&Catarina Paiva

Italian artist Carolina Papetti started her artistic career between London and Amsterdam. Coming from Dance Studies e Choreography, she has always been drawn to writing and filming and their use in the search for ambiguity, crating spaces, objects, texts, images, characters and materials. “I consider my artistic experience as a desire to expand the notion of biography. A desire for self-proliferation, transformation or biographical metamorphosis. Or a transgression of everything I experience.”

THIRTYTWO GIULIA (ACT ONE), 2020, performance-installation, performer: Jessica Matheson

Where does your research focus stem from?

I started writing and filming from a very young age.

I have always felt a strong attraction and intuition towards the experience-notion of ambivalence and ambiguity and a certain desire to grasp and reproduce certain scenes, images, looks and words that I perceived as suspended in time and space.

In my creative processes and works there is a constant research and creation of spaces, objects, texts, images, characters and materials intended as a material and conceptual juxtaposition, without prejudice , of apparently opposite aesthetics and choices that tend to simultaneously evoke feelings of desire, suspicion and indeterminacy.

From the very beginning, creating meant accepting and establishing a relationship-research with the notion of ambiguity as a desire to investigate aspects of reality that continually tend to escape and challenge the logic of effective meaning, addressing it on a sensory level.

I consider my artistic experience as a desire to expand the notion of biography.

A desire for self-proliferation, transformation or biographical metamorphosis.

Or a transgression of everything I experience.

I am drawn to framing cinematic images of love and decay and fueling the blurring of the lines between opposing forces.

My artistic research is an investigation into the relationship between architecture, intimacy, gender roles, staging and psychology, control and power.

Through my works, I question contemporary socio-political realities, the very meaning of making art and the ambiguity of language, through the search for a personal and covertly humorous visual style.

My artistic practice is multimedia and interdisciplinary, in constant research and creation of sounds, words, costumes, images, movements and objects, understood as a sharp gaze that explores a mental and social world.

My works revolve around the notions of self design, deconstruction of language, representation, psychoanalytic/aesthetic theories and a fascination with the subconscious and its generative potential.

In my works, the viewer is invited to enter dual spaces, created through a study of sensory and material architecture.

These spaces are inhabited by characters, objects and sounds with fragmented attitudes, which build and destroy a succession of images, scenes, texts, actions and gestures that move between the cryptic and the explicit.

From theater to the visual contemporary, arts: what moved you to explore new dimensions of self expression and research?

I vividly recall my initial entry into a theater.

A surge of physical and mental rebellion shattered the confines of any spatial, temporal, imaginative, and aesthetic paradigms I had previously encountered. This revelation unveiled unexplored frontiers, stirred desires, and cultivated an awareness of the profound transformative potential inherent in the concept of an image. At that juncture, the decision to immerse myself in the theater domain became evident; it was the solitary path through which my existence could attain its fullest expression.

Shortly thereafter, I embarked on my journey as a theater maker.

However, it wasn't long before I sensed that my theatrical approach was guiding me towards a novel perspective on staging – one that ventured to disrupt not only physical barriers but also certain established norms of the theater realm.

My inclination to challenge these boundaries, along with their societal and architectural implications, remained steadfast.

It was a conscious choice to collaborate with the same ensemble of performers across the years and productions I crafted. Through the dynamic evolution, dissolution, and subsequent reconstruction of characters that mirrored the prevailing moments, I cultivated a theatrical universe governed by distinct principles. This realm was consistently inhabited by characters, acting as custodians or captives of the space itself, shaping a scenic world with its own specific rules.

Each character was meticulously tailored in terms of attitude, appearance, and conceptual purpose for the unique setting of each composition.

Consequently, my fascination extended to viewing creation and space as immersive explorations – delving beyond the realm of physical bodies and performance to encompass the intricate interplay with materials, sound, lighting, scenography, and even the posture of the audience.

JJJ ACT WITHOUT, 2023, mixed media installation (detail: polyurethane cast of wolfdog, apples, wax) ph: Emanuele Sosio Galante

Following my departure from Amsterdam after a seven-year journey, a pivotal moment unfolded. I found myself working in solitude within the studio, void of performers and verbal interaction.

It prompted me to ponder: What remains? Who shares this space with me?

My interest gravitated towards the engagement with space, the specificity of a space;

I perpetually sensed the presence of characters, albeit in an enigmatic guise.

They wielded influence over the compositional choices, all while remaining concealed.

This inexplicable pull led me towards a creative realm that defied the conventional notions of liveness, expressed through sculpture and installation.

I was intrigued by the dialogue I could forge with these materials and how they reciprocated.

I find myself at a juncture where my surroundings assimilate differently, contingent on my creative context. Consequently, my intuition has guided me towards researching and creating through this ostensibly new process, although in essence, it isn't entirely new.

JJJ ACT WITHOUT, 2023, mixed media installation (detail: acrylic on latex)

What kind of challenge are you facing moving from a spatial, multi-layered practice to a more conceptual and object-centered one?

In reality, it strikes me that nothing has shifted throughout the creative and research journey. Even in my current focus on objects, I approach them as if they were integral to a stage, a set.

The architectural and evocative investigation of space constitutes the foundation of all my artistic processes.

This also extends to the dynamic of moving and dislocating my practice from one space to another.

How my research is affected, assembled and disassembled depending on where I am.

In a recurring way, it seems that what emerges from the creative process, during which each element is combined, is intimately connected and emerges from the walls, floor, ceiling and materials that make up the space in which I find myself.

My attention is focused on the specificity of each place, on the inevitable non-neutrality of the given and surrounding environment, considering elements such as smell, light, the distance between bodies and objects, as well as their potential interaction so that it is composed of a work.

I compose, craft , listen to, and organize objects with the same level of attentiveness and intuition I allocate to performers, employing a very similar methodology that aligns closely with considerations of light, sound, scent, materiality, and the aesthetics of the space.

They (the objects) do hold a profound vitality and complexity just like the performers.

During the installation process and the final arrangement and composition, my cognitive process mirrors that of composing for theater, performance, or film.

An aesthetic and conceptual exploration, which has always been woven into my methods, now takes on a distinct form, revealing itself in a novel spatial and temporal context and manifestation.

It's almost as though spacetime could arrive as if stirred.

Perhaps the most transformative aspect lies in the interaction with the audience, the spectators.

It's in their demeanor, in the time spent in front-together with an artwork, juxtaposed against the spatial, imaginative, and temporal rapport ignited by live performances.

GIULIA OR NOT (ACT THREE), 2021, performance-installation, performers: Jessica Matheson&Catarina Paiva

Written and spoken words have a primary role in your works. Aren’t they synthesis of images themselves? Aren’t they the very essence of humanity?

Words, the notion and experience of language itself, stand as one of the most expansive windows into my artistic journey and exploration.

They swing open and shut, consistently granting me passage to diverse landscapes.

In fact, my relationship with words, stretching back to my earliest years, revolves around perceiving them as images or sounds, hollowed and transformed in their meaning.

Each of my creative processes initiates with a textual element, a written impulse I subsequently permit to unveil and mutate throughout the creative journey. This evolution persists until it takes its form within the artwork, perhaps deliberately distinct from its origins. Perhaps.

Especially when I engage with spoken language, the juncture of transmitting the text to the performers holds paramount importance. It is within this moment that I tangibly realize the resonance of my written words. They undergo transformation; meanings shift from the abstract to the corporeal. Words morph into characters, occupying roles on stage—certainly not as mere solitary symbols. Words metamorphose into sounds, utterances, distant echoes, conjured images.

Undoubtedly, I hold an interest in distorting and deconstructing the inherent essence associated with words through my creations.

How are you finding the attempt to spatialize words, or better said, symbolic and conceptual images such as words?

I've always been fascinated by what wasn't directly expressed through words, or the various sometimes ambiguous and misleading attempts to string words together to create meanings.

I am fascinated by verbal incommunicability, the unspoken, the concealed.

My texts strive to challenge, or even clash with the expectation of coherence.

I write extensively, yet I often perceive each word as void, maybe- relishing the pauses between sentences, the inaugural and final words of a text.

And I like seemingly deviant words.

Spatializing words is an instinctive process for me, consistently emerging as a foundational creative necessity. However, for a considerable duration, I grappled with this urge to engage with written text without fully comprehending where and how it sought expression within space. Each time I neared the point of composition, this intuition unfolded as though the text shouldn't be overtly visible, but rather imperceptibly present—seamlessly woven into the creative process and its resulting creation.

This internal dialogue, questioning the text's true role in the spatial realm, remains with me. I'm undeniably captivated by the text's relationship to materiality—where it's inscribed, engraved, and the perspective from which it's sonically installed. My approach to words is akin to sculpting. I write, and then it's as if the words beckon me to shape their spatial materialization. Like sculptures really.

GIULIA OR NOT (ACT TWO), 2021, performance-installation, performers: Jessica Matheson&Catarina Paiva

Do you fear anything about intimacy, dreams and nightmares, desires?

I wouldn't create it if it weren't for my relationship to these words you mentioned.

I don't know if it's fear or if I would call it fear.

The moment I think of them as fears I think of their finitude, while instead their infinity pushes me.

The ambiguity of these experiences is what fascinates me the most, I don't have a coherent and linear relationship with intimacy, with dreams, nightmares and desires.

It's a jagged relationship, full of knots that when I seem to have untied, they tie up again.

The realm of slumber, encompassing dreams and nightmares, has undeniably evolved into a paramount wellspring for my research and creative processes. Especially pertinent is the realm of sleep paralysis, an experience characterized by its profound impact on both physical experience and imagery—factors that consistently fuel my creative processes. In this context, my artistic practice is dedicated to enacting and staging that unconscious, surreal dimension. I perceive it as an inexhaustible source of perpetual transformative substance and a multitude of interpretations, central to my work.

In the same way I approach intimacy and desires, their apparent irresolution and resistance to a single definition. I may even fear them, but I am constantly, daily, looking for them inside and outside the artistic and human dimension.