Interview with Flavia Spasari

Giacomo Pigliapoco

In your artistic practice, materials are essential as they are the threads of a more complex narrative and symbolic fabric. What criteria guided you in the selection for Untitled?

Flavia Spasari

Untitled explores the concept of overproduction in relation to humanity. Therefore, the choice of materials was deliberate, as they symbolize remnants of this process and possess the ability to carry memories, expectations, and the essence of civilization. Regardless of its negative impact, each product and leftover created by humans holds a deep sense of intimacy that brings the material to life and gives it an independent existence in the world. Hence, the deconstructed scaffolding represents both the aspirations of the migration movement in Southern Italy during the 1950s and 60s and a tangible consequence of it. On the other hand, the marble represents a city’s desire to expand its horizons but inadvertently ends up contaminating itself.

GP

In many of your works, you emphasize a new perspective that goes beyond the classification and dichotomy of “natural and artificial”, a metamorphosis or a change of state that surpasses predetermined categories. How else have you investigated the transformation of matter in your research?

FS

I have always been interested in the membrane of the skin as a point of exchange. Everything that is absorbed passes into our interior, literally changing our state at the particle level. We absorb the world. Sound has enabled me to investigate the transformations that occur when two realities come into contact. If we think about it, sound enters our body through any orifice, vibrating our bones and changing our way of perceiving and being. The same encounter between multiple opposing materials creates a transformation. Therefore, the dichotomy has always paradoxically driven me to study the boundary where it is overcome and find that point of metamorphosis. That point where everything becomes liquid for a moment and has the possibility of merging with something else.

GP

What is the origin of the desire to draw a com- parison between your personal experiences related to your biographical locations and the impact of overproduction on nature in Untitled?

FS

I had never intentionally included my experience within a work; I had always noticed an opulent self-referential in those who did, but at the same time, an inherent need in anyone who creates something. Each of us places ourselves and our own history in the words we use, in the way we observe, and in the way we handle an object. I wondered why I had started working with forgotten pieces, and what imprinting had influenced my language. I ending up realizing that materials not only represent physical surplus but also a life in a diary sense. What are hopes if not overproductions of expectations?

GP

The defunctionalization of the elements that you have carried out in the work, such as the innocent tube, the electrical cable, the scraps of Carrara marble, do they acquire another symbolic value or are they merely related to utility?

FS

Both. If the elements, in this case, the remnants, are considered as a form of life, as they transform, and mutate; a mutation is a process, and every process leads to a completed result. In this instance, the defunctionalization of the electrical cable, symbolically understood as a carrier of a vital flow, does not carry anything, has no sound, and is not an active conductor of energy. Polluting remains have no end; they are lives for which society does not take responsibility. They wait. Even the title does not specifically serve a function but contributes to the meaning of the installation through its indefiniteness. The uselessness of the elements is symbolically useful to the meaning of the work.