Simonetta Fadda

From objet trouvé to ready-made, cut-up and Found Footage, recovering pre-existing elements and bringing them back to a new symbolic and real life, changing their function, is an aesthetic and ethical gesture, with even subversive connotations. In my case, this attitude is particularly aimed at disused or obsolete television technology

As soon as I started exhibiting my work in galleries in the 1980s, the contradictions and claustrophobia of value relationships within the art system immediately jumped out at me. At the same time, increasingly pervasive control strategies were creeping into society, justified by the increasing spread of feelings of insecurity. The art system appeared to me as a mirror to the present of what society was becoming, to the future. Thus, my first closed-circuit installations with video, even when they resolve themselves into seemingly playful situations, stage the forms of surveillance at work in society and in the art system.

Kit to build the installtion.

The two-dimensionality of the image is transformed into the three-dimensionality of a light sculpture

The project started in the summer of 2018 and concerns the new meanings assumed by commonly used words within the Internet. My idea was born at the beach, listening to the talk of the teenagers around me. Although I perfectly understood what they were saying, at a certain point I realised that they were speaking an anomalous slang, made up of very normal words, but with a cryptic meaning capable of taking the discourse in unexpected directions. In fact, it could not even be called “slang”, since even all adults (or almost all) use it when talking about their experiences on the Internet. In this way, I discovered that the Internet had had the power to create clone words, the GENETICALLY MODIFIED WORDS, in every way identical to already existing words. Clone words, however, in their imperceptible shifts in meaning, ultimately come to empty or contradict the traditional meanings of pre-existing terms, at the same time transforming our perception of their function for us

The project was born in early 2020. It is the result of the encounter between an ancient Sardinian tapestry, found at the bottom of my grandmother’s chest, and the feminist performance created in November 2019 by the Chilean collective Las Tesis, for the day against violence against women. Such distant suggestions have become associated into a project of wool and cotton tapestries that revisit the Sardinian textile tradition. The reference iconography is that of the couple engaged on the Sardinian dance, a recurring motif of Sardinian folk illustrations, consisting of a man and a woman holding hands, repeated serially to evoke the typical circularity of the Sardinian dance. For my tapestries I chose black and white, and the traditional workmanship called "a pibiones" in Sardinian language, that is, in clusters. It is a technique characterized by a relief embroidery on a dotted plot that serves as a background. The effect is almost sculptural, a kind of cloth bas-relief. Moreover, the dots of the weft on which the "pibiones" embroideries are woven, if fixed for a long time, produce a strongly kinetic visual effect, very similar to that of the TV screen devoid of images of my childhood memories. An important reminder for me, since my history as an artist started from there, from analog video and the imperfect, liquid images of low definition.

Tapestries woven at Marcella Sanna’s “Medusa” artisanal textile workshop in Samugheo, Sardinia