VALENTINA BIASETTI from Casatico di Torrechiara (Parma)
Your new daily ritual ...
For me it's nothing new to lock myself in the studio in voluntary self-isolation as a process of creation, but when the choice gives way to an imposition (necessary) the parameters change. In this period you ask yourself what use going into the studio every day could be, sit at the drawing board and work, a ritual that previously seemed necessary and which now risks taking on the rhetoric of self-indulgence. But I believe it is vital to react and take advantage of this opportunity to reflect on what the artist's role and his expressive needs really are. I have come to the conclusion that my ritual does not change, rather it grows stronger. I continue to draw to search inside my demon for a more intimate vision of things.
How your way of working has changed?
From this short room perimeter which is my study, I used to think that curses and deceptions could remain outside but these days I realized that this is not the case: the walls seem narrower, the objects that surround me take on new identities, new weights, many thoughts. My way of working hasn't changed, but the gaze that wants to investigate things.
We are dealing with a new time and space. What are you discovering or rediscovering about yourself?
Time that passes seems suspended, confuses past, future and present, that noisy time, habitual, he has now subverted himself in solitude, where every word or gesture has a profound echo. Maybe this is why in this quarantine I started drawing hourglasses that reveal memories by mixing them with restlessness. I'll call them Hourglasses but they are objects of common use, like a jug, a glass or a vase of flowers, who give up their homely identity to become collectors of this vacuum-packed time.
It is not possible to divide time, time is probably just thought and every “hourglass object” is a witness to my present.
What you're missing? Your personal experience of "absence" and "lack".
Limitations and shortcomings today are daily bread from many points of view, I've always had to deal with a limitation: drawing. Drawing is the most useful limitation I know for breaking new ground because drawing something with ten lines requires much more imagination than drawing it with twenty., and where everything is lack, inventing something becomes permissible. In this period what I miss is not freedom, but lightness because when I hear the ambulances screaming in the road at the bottom of the valley it is impossible to be light.
How do you imagine the world, when everything will start again?
When I think about what it will be like I think that there are infinite possibilities in an existence. They are there until you have used up your bottle of soap bubbles. When it all ends, it will never cease to exist in our memory, and we will carry it inside us as a very strong experience. What I hope is that we can have more beautiful eyes, cleaner to be able to admire our soap bubbles.
Valentina Biasetti (Parma, 1979). I have always interpreted drawing as a desire for existence, the pencil caresses the sheet and intertwines signs, backgrounds, struggles and echoes of stories: surgically exploring every single detail, I isolate him from his dimension, I change relationships and identities, in an attempt to transform it and make it IN-forms. This is the process that unites my latest series of works such as the "anatomical caves" where the denial of bodies carves out space for the invisible or the "Hourglasses", commonly used objects, like a jug, a glass or a vase of flowers, who give way to their homely identity to become collectors and witnesses of a vacuum-packed time. Looking inside things and then trying to go through them, subverting their substance.
www.valentinabiasetti.it