*I was already a Francesca Fini fan, having bought her work on Sedition Art, but having read this new interview, I now know WHY I am a Francesca Fini fan.
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You reference older works of art and art-historical movements in works like Custom Size, Girl With Butterflies, and The Time Machine. Do you see your own work as part of an older tradition? How do you see it relating to the past?
Kierkegaard said one that life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. I feel great love and gratitude for the past, for all the men and women who lived before us, building this crazy carousel in which we still find ourselves now. I live in a city, Rome, where the layers of history are visible with the naked eye, where you can get stuck in traffic, and under the red lamp of a traffic light you can see a piece of the Coliseum. As a child, on school trips, I used to put my hand over the Roman bricks and think of the people who had touched those same bricks over the centuries: a magic that still enchants me.
Today I feel part of an eternal present that contains everything and everyone. My work reflects all this: it's a "time machine" that collects objects, images and suggestions from the most diverse historical periods, and mixes them with glimpses of the present. This Dadaist collagism also reflects in my work as a performance artist, where time does not exist at all and you live the "here and now", the eternal and ritualistic present. My most successful feature movie, "Ophelia did not drown" (https://ofelianonannega.tumblr.com/), is a close dialogue between the contemporary language of performance art and the historical documentaries collected by "Istituto Luce", the national film library, in a process of osmosis between past and present. A time machine that ultimately allows the Shakespearean heroine to save herself, and to betray her romantic destiny in order to become "a normal person".
When looking at art history, you take inspiration from many different eras – alongside Old Masters you reinterpret Pop Art, Dada, Rococo and modernist paintings. Do you think any of these loose movements are particularly interesting to bring into contact with digital technology?
I have been often called a "neo-futurist" artist. Indeed, Futurism, as one of the greatest cultural movements of the twentieth century in Italy, in its conflict against the dreamy bourgeois culture, the romantic "moonlights", the decadence of museums and archeology, showed a strong impulse towards the renewal of the past, while celebrating the dynamism, speed and energy of the future of industrial civilization. I believe that today we still live on income compared to the great avant-gardes of the recent past. Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism and Pop Art are the nourishment of all contemporary art. In fact they already had in their core the concept of digital culture, they somehow prefigured it in every possible way, anticipating its aesthetics and sometimes even its devices: just think of Duchamp, the experimental music by the futurist Russolo, precursor of the "Musique concrète" and electronic music, the Dadaist collage or the concept of reproducibility and reuse in Pop Art.
In my practice, this "steam-punk" or "cyber-punk" drive is constantly present. I think that exploring and renewing certain tensions, certain suggestions that come from the legacy of these artistic movements, is a way to complete the process, to close the circuit, so to speak....
