IN THE STUDIO WITH MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARTIST GIULIA FRASCINO.

Where are you from and how has your background led your art?

My name is Giulia Frascino, I'm 28 years old and I'm a mixed-media visual artist. I am half Brazilian, half Italian. I was born in Brazil in the city of São José do Rio Preto, in the countryside. I studied in Sao Paulo Brazil where I graduated in Visual Arts, and then I specialised in Curatorial Studies in Venice, finishing my Masters's in Typography Practice and Editorial Design in Lisbon. Lisbon is where I'm based right now, and where I have my space at Echo Studios.

What significant experiences shaped your artistic path?

I think the art universe always got me in a way. My mum did fashion design and she's really creative. My dad was always a strong creative figure - he always used to bring me materials of all kinds. He put me into painting classes when I was 14; I think that was the first time I was actually expressing myself through painting. 

I started to really think about being in the art universe when I moved to Rome when I was 15. I was really young, and as a girl from the countryside, it was really a shock for me to see a big city and such huge museums. I didn't know what I wanted to do; I didn’t even know if I wanted to be an artist, but I knew that I wanted to be in the art environment. When I came back, a part of me was like, ‘I dont know know what I want to do but it has to be something with art’.

Then I found this course at the University in Sao Paulo. The curriculum was ‘an experimental body lab’ - this kind of discipline - and I thought, ‘Okay, maybe I want to do this; I don't know what this is but I want to do it’. So when I went to Sao Paulo it was like putting a small fish into a big aquarium. I was really confronted with a new reality in terms of art. I thought art was all of the ‘isms’ we learn in school - impressionism, cubism etc. But when I arrived and I started to read about and see contemporary art, I realised this is something else, this is really about my context, it's about finding my voice as an artist, and how my voice and my intimate self can relate to other people's intimate selves. So it was more about researching. And I was 17 years old, so I was too young to know what my voice was inside my creations. 

Later, it was more and more about developing myself as an artist and throwing myself into different experiences in terms of different media and different languages. I was very curious about creation.

Did you experiment a lot with different media? What is your main medium now?

Yes. At the university, there were so many things to do and to learn - so many practices and different kinds of techniques: photography; sewing on paper (I got crazy about this technique); calligraphy; engraving processes… I got to learn so many techniques that as I grew as an artist, and for the different phases of my research, there were different surfaces that could speak what I wanted to speak; that could be the surface that I wanted to manifest my idea.

I feel that in my practice I don't have a chosen material that communicates what I want to say. There are a lot of materials I use, and it depends on the phase I'm at in my research, and the context I'm dealing with at that moment. All these things will determine the surface that is going to manifest what I'm thinking. Sometimes it's very visceral and very organic, and I don't think much, and sometimes I think before the material itself. 

In my practice, I found that It’s important to look back at your research and realise the common thread that crosses all of your artworks. It's really nice to look back at your practice visually and see the common points, and to understand the common ideas that are manifested. 

I think the writing process is really my starting point - it's where I start everything I do. It comes as a word and a concept of that word or a definition. In the past few years, I feel my narrative comes with a desireto play with the definitions themself, with concepts and the abstract. There are certain concepts that I like to disrupt in some kind of way. For example, lately, it’s been this idea of writing backwards; it comes a lot from this desire to find something that maybe I lost when I was writing ‘right’. The writing itself and the typography is something that comes through a lot in my work, as well as the silences they contain, not only in the words, but also in the white space.

“SOMETIMES IT'S VERY VISCERAL AND VERY ORGANIC, AND I DON'T THINK MUCH, AND SOMETIMES I THINK BEFORE THE MATERIAL ITSELF.” 

Are there specific themes or narratives you work with?

If I look back over the past 10 years of producing, I also see that repetition, and the visual mantra of repetition, is something I bring into my work a lot. When I zoom out, I see that I like to create narratives through objects and repetition, but these come and go. 

I like to think about different characters that could speak what I'm thinking at that moment. I’ve been working lately with the ideas of arrows, stairs, rocks, thread. It’s always about how I can explore an object in different ways - visually, their meaning, and materially, physically. In terms of a common narrative, I like to bring in these objects to think about the writing itself, the process of doing something, and of thinking about something in an obsessive way. I like these concepts: obsession, repetition, frustration. I choose objects to talk about that, and they repeat themselves.

If other people are experiencing your work, what do you want them to think or feel? What do you communicate through your art?

It depends. Bringing objects is an important way I create entry and access to my work. I like to bring objects to talk about life itself, to create metaphors. Through metaphor or through disrupting different kinds of uses of these objects, I bring a discussion into my work. 

Is there something right now that is new that you are experimenting with?

I feel that right now I've been experimenting a lot because I have found a studio. For the past 6 months since I found this space, I feel like my work has gone very multidisciplinary. The paper wasn't enough. The workshops that I host are like a lab for me to introduce experimenting with words and objects. And now I feel the need to start experimenting with my body and with words. I’m doing that by learning how to sew, how to dress words, and how to start making clothes. I think when I see my practice at the moment, I see it is going towards performance, gathering body, word, writing and fabric. I feel that my art is expanding and amplifying in that way. It’s not only paper and tiny scales.

Do you have any unique rituals or practices when you're in the studio?

I think as artists we can be very lonely in the process of making art, especially because it can be very loud inside. For me, finding a space for my art to happen, that embraces my kind of practice, is really good. I feel that my art is expanding because I have a studio and a place where I can do that. I can hang things on the wall, I can put things on the floor, I can inspire myself with other people’s practices.

I think, for me, the main idea of finding a space was the feeling that I can have my moments of silence, that I can be in my studio working, but at the same time, I don't feel alone. I look around and I see other people carrying out their creative processes. This inspires me so much. The best thing to help me create is to see other people's creations. Right now my art is expanding because of that.

“I LOOK AROUND AND I SEE OTHER PEOPLE CARRYING OUT THEIR CREATIVE PROCESSES. THIS INSPIRES ME SO MUCH.”

How has Echo Studios influenced the trajectory of your artwork? How are you involved in Echo Studios as a collective?

I think when I found Echo Studios I was really looking for this kind of collective vision. I was trying to find artists or creators that had this ambition in their visions too - to really take their own work seriously, but also to find a way to collaborate. In Brazil, I used to collaborate a lot with other artists and practices, and i hadn't found that here until i found Echo Studios. It was really a match. 

With Echo as a collective, we want to gather all the individualities and all the strong creative veins each artist has here and discover how can we bring that into an agency; how we can offer that into a service where we bring all of our strong points and unique practices together and make a masterpiece. I believe so much in the project that when I found Echo Studios, I was like, okay, this is where I want my seed to grow. It is where I found fertile ground in that sense - it’s really amazing and rare in the creative universe and I think I found it in Echo Studios.