New artist-in residence: Valentina Achilli

Valentina Achilli, E’ colpa tua se non mangio più, 2024, cotton yarn, acrylic colors on linen canvas, 90x70 cm.

Working at the boundary between visual art and poetry, Valentina Achilli draws on fibrous materials like paper or fabric to address issues such as the fragility and value of language in psychoanalytic, anthropological, and sociological contexts.
What is expressed through the repetitive and mechanical action of embroidery is both familiar and foreign: words, phrases and verses left by strangers in urban settings. The traces are collected and recomposed on the canvas in a constant oscillation between readable word and a-semantic sign. 
The gesture of hand embroidery makes slow, meditative, and permanent a writing that would otherwise be fast, transient and ephemeral.

Valentina Achilli (Piacenza, 1997) lives and works in Milan. In 2020 she graduated in Painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where she decided to continue with the two-year specialisation course Theory and Practice of Art Therapy.