This week we connected Daniele Formica to Vibeke Mascini and Vibeke to Daniele. They answered each others questions about their artist mantra and moving situations.
What is the best or worst exchange you ever took part in?
Here is a recent one which I find quite absurd, thus fascinating.
I was at the house of a fruit and vegetable trader. While showing me around his house and drinking champagne from heavy glasses, we exchanged some words over his open-air bathroom/bedroom’s bathtub -which had a switch for the glass windows to turn opaque by shining light through them.
I gained knowledge about lifestyle and technology, he got compliments on the bathtub.
Make a list of things you would like to perform as often as washing your hands these days.
My hands are getting drier and drier due to the continuous rubbing of a basic substance on them. It makes me really worried that they might be getting harmed. It makes me feel like I am drying from the outside.
So for every time I will be washing my hands, I as well hope I will be touching others, picking-up cash from the ground, and putting cream on my hands.
Would you describe a situation that moved you recently?
A couple of months ago I was on the phone with my mother and she was telling me how impressed she was about the silence, a silence she had never experienced before.
She resides in Perugia, Italy, together with my father. She was holding the phone out of the 7th-floor window to try and share such silence with me. It had to do with the lockdown, with people having stopped doing what they would usually be doing. I imagined she could not stand it because she is as hectic as me.
Daniele Formica ‘Laurel Branch’ (2020)
Can you formulate a statement or sentence that you’d repeat to yourself and/or others frequently, a sort of artist mantra?
I’ve come to believe that a great work of art needs to be smarter than its maker.
When a work has been trusted to outgrow the premeditated thought -and with that the control– which started it. During the working process that turning point might be misunderstood as an obstruction.
Do you have an artwork/anecdote in the process where you felt like you were getting heavier and deeper into the ground; and one that made you feel lighter and fluid in the sky?
People who I spend time with will soon notice that I speak a lot about whales.
The blue whale is known to be the heaviest animal that has ever inhabited this planet and yet it spends a lifetime relatively weightless, floating in the world ocean. It strikes me how these enigmatic beings paradoxically signify both immense weight and profound lightness.
How would you relate your art practice to your sense of time, from past/present/future to “I feel like painting today”?
I recently read a description by Ursula K. Le Guin that beautifully relates to time and timing. Le Guin helped me recognize a challenging but essential phase I reach in nearly every project I work on. When one has to be “…patient like a cat hunting. Very, very attentive, alert but patient. Slow.”
Vibeke Mascini ‘Salvage’ (2019)
These interviews are part of an ongoing series of short interviews between Unfair artists, originally published through our mailings. Check the overview to read the other interviews or subscribe to our mailing list through the button below:
These interviews are part of an ongoing series of short interviews between Unfair artists, originally published through our mailings. Check the overview to read the other interviews or subscribe to our mailing list through the button below: