Twenty-fifteen has been an intense year full of cheerfulness, discovery and adventure – I feel I learned so much! For starters I reconquered Rome, which I re-elected as my base (I keep on saying “for the time being”, but truth is, I’m in love with this city). Since I installed in my bedroom in San Lorenzo – the left-leaning, working-class neighborhood of Rome – I felt a new chapter of my life had started.
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When I chose to become a freelance journalist, the possibility of working from everywhere was extremely luring. And I experimented a little with it, especially that couple of years that I was based first in Melbourne, Australia, and then going back and forth between Rome and Sorrento every two weeks. I quickly found out that what I pictured as total freedom, actually required an unusual amount of discipline.
In this piece for ArtsHub I interviewed absolute experts on location independency: writers Shannon O’Donnel of A Little Adrift, Jeannie Mark of Nomadic Chick and artist Veronica Kent. In this sense writing for ArtsHub is fantastic because it gives me the chance to go around and ask questions on matters that I feel pressing. And being a full-time digital nomad is still something I give a lot of thought to.
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Naples in December is possibly even more stunning and lively than normal, and walking from the train station to the Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale in the winter sun has been truly a gift. Likewise, it has been a gift to have the chance to introduce contemporary art in Indonesia to the students in a seminar organized by Prof. Antonia Soriente. Prof. Soriente is a wonderful and inspiring women who is having a fundamental role in introducing Indonesian literature and culture to Italy, both with her work in the university and projects like translation of books. I was really honoured to be invited to her course.
The audience was great and there have been a lot of interesting questions popping up at the end of the lecture. Students were asking about the relationship of Indonesia with western art and eastern art, landscape painting and Mooi Indie, what role Islam is having in the contemporary art scene and also inquiring about the best way to approach contemporary art in general – as many of them are new to it. I deeply enjoyed engaging with students, as for me it’s always a chance to share and reflect, and most importantly being part of someone’s experience. With every single thing you do, you’re able to have an impact, however small it is – and you can learn so much through discussion! And now a few pics from the presentation…
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I have to admit the video reports with the TeenPress guys was something I was missing from my life. We are finally back with a new micro-series with the self-explanatory name “Giovani Creativi”. For these installments creatives of all stripes join us in our studio in Pietralata, Rome. We chat about their artistic practice, creative process, everyday life and day-to-day struggles. We have started with Cristiano Quagliozzi, painter, sculptor, installation and performance artist, who opens up about his upcoming project and gives us his definition of artist. Enjoy the video!
Times of Malta’s Sunday magazine Escape has published my review on Fotografia, the international photography festival of Rome. It was good fun to write it – and if you are wondering how the selfie mentioned in the article actually looks like, look no further.
First signs of my research here in Singapore. Australian webmagazine ArtsHub has just published my article on the National Gallery of Singapore, which will open to public on the 24th of November.
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Hello from Singapore! Before leaving for the Lion City (I’m conducting interviews for my upcoming reportage), I was spurred by a comment by artist Grace Siregar to look at gender gap in the arts in South East Asia. I talked about it with a few people and wrote a piece on the subject for ArtsHub.
Here’s the link to the article
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When we turn our thoughts to contemporary art from Egypt, the first images that come to mind are political graffiti and militant posters. Our idea of Egyptian art is attached strongly to concepts such as uprising, revolution and the Arab Spring. In this piece for the webmagazine Middle East Monitor I look at how the upcoming Something Else Off Biennale Cairo is changing those labels and refreshing the Cairo art scene.
Here’s the link to the article
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“Exoticism is an endlessly fascinating topic and an ongoing subject of exploration for me. On one hand exoticism is a necessary tool for curiosity. It has something of the infatuation in a way. When you fall in love with someone, you project your fantasies on them – which of course have nothing to do with the actual person and everything to with those damn adventures of Wolverine, Psylocke and Jubilee in Madripoor – which totally screwed up your brain as a teenager. Anyway, that confused exotic approach is necessary in order to take the next step to get closer to your subject and learn. Exoticism becomes dangerous when it’s taken at face value. When it is not the starting point for further explorations, but it becomes a stereotype to pigeonhole people and cultures. Not surprisingly many Indonesian artists and artists with a non-western background play a lot around this concept. They reverse roles, make fun of stereotypes and show potential dangers connected to them.”
I have recently been interviewed by photojournalist Stefano Romano for the Indonesian webmagazine Baltyra. In the interview we chat a bit about my book “Arte Contemporanea in Indonesia, un’introduzione“, discuss the developments of art in Indonesia and talk tradition, censorship and exoticism.
Here’s the link to the interview
Australian/Uk webmagazine ArtsHub has published my piece “Four ways arts workers can win in the new economy”. I have been interested in the sharing economy and the opportunities it provides to artists and art workers from a long time. By researching and writing this piece I got excited about the future – we tend to perceive our time as less revolutionary compared to the past decades, but actually there is so much going on, thanks to new technologies and the internet. In the piece I talk about three platforms that are contributing to reinventing the economy.
Here’s the link to the article
Here’s a pdf version of the piece
“I never decide in advance why I want to talk about a subject; it just arises from the context. The wall in particular is a symbol that speaks to me strongly,” says Tunisian-Russian artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke, to explain her new work at Dallas Contemporary gallery. “For me, walls mean separation. But walls are also skins that say something about a city and the people who live there in hidden ways,” she observes. “I have always been interested in revealing the invisible.”
Nadia Kaabi-Linke was born in Tunis in 1978 to a Russian mother and Tunisian father, she studied at the University of Fine Arts in Tunis before receiving a PhD from La Sorbonne in Paris. Her installations, objects and pictorial works are embedded in urban contexts, intertwined with memory and geographically and politically constructed identities. She currently has a solo show, called “Walk the Line”, at Dallas Contemporary in Texas, USA, from September 20 until December 21. I have interviewed Nadia for Middle East Monitor , asking her about her personal path through art, the Tunisian contemporary art scene and the theme of migration in her work.
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Published! Graphic Journalism and Migration on Global Comment
My piece “How A New Generation of Graphic Novels Are Portraying Migration” has just been published on the webmagazine Global Comment. For this piece I spoke with graphic journalist Gianluca Costantini, comic book artist and illustrator Matt Huynh and SBS producer Kylie Boltin.
Here’s the link to the article
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