Workseries: drawings, floor intervention, conversations
Villa Massimo, Rome 2023
During her short-term fellowship, Valeria Fahrenkrog developed her artistic research project starting from discarded materials found in the Villa Massimo warehouse. These included old banners and folders.
The folders were reused by the artist respectively as paper on which she drew the motifs photographed around Rome that caught her attention: mainly, stacked cardboards, stones, mosaic floors. The old banners were transformed into tablecloths that accompanied the ‚Material Pic-Nic‘ mini-series of interviews, which Fahrenkrog conducted in the park of Villa Massimo with the fellows in residence. The main aim of the interviews was to create a dialogue with other artists in order to understand their relationship with the objects they cannot do without in their work.
Both actions had as their starting point the ‚Intervento minimo‘ theory by the sociologist Lucius Burckhardt on the importance of working in a sustainable way with already existing materials and objects.
As part of the ‚Material Pic-Nic‘ series, Fahrenkrog also created the temporary installation ‚Squame‘ in front of the Villa Massimo main building, made of discarded objects of the Academy.
Text: Annalisa Piersanti
Material Pic-Nic, Series of mixed-media drawings on found Villa Massimo paper folders
Material Pic-Nic: Squame, floor installation with discarded objects in the front of the Villa Massimo main building
