Artist on artist: Carla Zaccagnini on Edi Hila

Carla Zaccagnini is an artist and writer, sometimes curator, lately educator; born in Buenos Aires, raised in São Paulo, based in Malmö and working between Malmö and Copenhagen. This in-between position –both in terms of geographic (dis)placement and in relation to the fields of art making, writing, curating, and education – defines her vantage point, her way of seeing, and her (broken) language.

Zaccagnini’s conceptually driven practice is a continuous process of inquiry, which can solidify in a variety of material appearances, from printed text to film, from drawings to installations, from an exhibition to a reading group. Central to her investigation is an interest in how invisible power structures or struggles are made visible; what forms they assume when becoming visible; and how these forms are present in our daily lives and imagination. By recontextualizing existing objects, analysing recurrent images, and deconstructing persisting narratives, her work questions the limitations and bias of language and representation, and the fallibility and partiality of perception and understanding, challenging naturalized ways of thinking, telling, and depicting, thus proposing other ways of imagining and acting in the world.

Although Edi Hila and Carla Zaccagnini seem to have very different practices, the first dedicated primarily to painting, the later without focusing on any specific media, both have in common an interest in the limits of what can be represented. What are the untold stories and invisible forces that can be carried and brought to light in the portrait of a building? What is the form that can give presence to collective traumas that we have no words to name? This will be a talk about a certain belief in art as a way to bring the unspoken to the public arena, about the efforts made to create a representation where none seems possible, and about the constant failures that make us continue trying.