Cristina
Picco
Multimedia Artist
Artistic statement
By bridging disciplines, languages, and codes, my work explores the idea of community and the unexpressed within it.
As an economist and town planner, for many years I’ve been an observer of societal’s structures and power dynamics. Curious about how individual experiences frame the collective field of interactions, I have started investigating. Specifically, I am interested in what informs the human experience at an individual and collective level.
This research led me to the field of collective trauma; the need to witness and honour the unexpected findings of this research is the guiding force behind my practice.
Embodied experiences, such as collective rituals, inform my artwork as I dig into the “shadow archives” of human history.
I see art as a component of daily life and I see art processes as opportunities to open-up to doubt, to dialogue, to self-consciousness, to playfulness.
Inclusive textile crafts, such as embroidery, sewing and knitting, provide the tools for me to create not just metaphors and symbolic actions, but also important conceptual intersection between participation, social engagement and spiritual environmental kinship.
Bio
I was raised in Pordenone, a small town in the North-East of Italy. The very same year I was born, my region, Friuli, was hit by a series of earthquakes that destroyed buildings and families. During my childhood, building sites were all over and I became acquainted with the experience of reconstruction. People felt somehow connected through this shared experience, even though they were not talking much, and daily life was somehow rough.
Living in that region during the ‘80s and early ‘90s also meant that the border between the “Eastern” and the “Western” blocks was just a few dozen km away.
I recall check-points experiences, nasty, sometime absurd, but most of all I recall the feeling of crossing the borders.
As a child, I spent whole summers hanging out at my grandmother’s small town mountain coffee place.
In the morning, after having milked their cows, attenders would come for a glass of wine and a chat.
My grandmother used to plant marigolds in broken washing-machine drums. Her 10 sqm garden was a mixture of greens growing amidst scrap metal and building discharged materials arranged according to her own very specific aesthetics.
End of the ‘80s was also the era of the first nuclear accident in Chernobyl and of the fall of the Berlin Wall. A decade full of optimism and thrill was yet to come.
I was raised in the illusion that being a talented student, my main duty would be to push my formal education. As a young adult I then moved to Milan to study and work. Business Administration at the Bocconi university first and lately Town Planning at the Politecnico.
Throughout my early adulthood in a big urban center, I learned that people apply strict categories to identify their role in society and I could feel the oppressing presence of structures. It has been an intense time, not always easy.
Travelling has been my companion since then: for holidays, moving to study abroad or for living, eventually landing in Luxembourg, in the hearth of Europe, where I live and work at the intersection of many borders.