Francesca Grilli's early works focus on videos documenting her performances inspired by her interaction with members of her family, such as 194.9 MHz for example, where she describes the relationships with her father, or Gordon where she invited her grandfather to play Bocce with her. Since 2006 her focus shifts to performance and sound installations such as ' where she invited two elderly dancers to dance Tango for 3 hours in front of a video projection of an empty dancehall. The next year she presented ' where she asked an aged woman, who used to be a Soprano singer, to perform at midnight. Both the performances stress on the ageing body in relation to time and their ability to challenge their physical limits putting memory to test. With she started a research about the idea of the 'resistant body', meaning a body with some sort of physical limitation, which sees such limitation as a special condition to explore, within a performative act. The work analyzes the relationship between a singer affected by Albinism and light, through a scientific experiment which uses the Rubens' tube. The performer interacts with the light source generated by the experiment in order to control it: the flame reacts on the voice of the performer according to her tone and volume. In 2010 she realizes The Conversation where she invited a deaf teenager to listen to live music through the vibration produced by the sound waves, and to sing using the Italian Sign Language. The performance was the recipient of the Nuove Arti award, promoted by the Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy. Gold, Iron and Variazioni per Voce focus on the state censorship on music operated by the Istituto Centrale per i Beni Sonori ed Audiovisivi di Roma emphasizing on the paradox between the preservation of cultural heritage and its destruction. In Fe2O3, OSSIDO FERRICO presented at the at the Venice Biennale in 2013, she incorporates some elements of her previous artworks, in particular, the use of sound as the main element. The artist invited a group of female performers, who were asked to interact daily with a massive iron wall through vocalizations for six months. A microphone was connected to a mechanism that released drops of water on the iron surface causing its corrosion. The idea was to eventually open a gap on the wall using the performances' voices and water. In 2015 for the performance Family presented at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven she invited a family from the city composed by 4 individuals to sing a repertoire related to the museum's collection, every change of season until 2017. Throughout two years the members of the family grew older and their voices changed, especially as regards the youngest and the oldest family member. Every performance was documented with a photograph and audio recorded in order to prove the effect of time on the bodies and the voices. The museum acquired the documentation which is now part of the collection. The Forgetting of Air uses air as the material shared between the audience and the performer. Considering breathing as the first individual autonomous action that brings life to a being and inspired by the recent facts regarding migratory fluxes throughout the Mediterranean Sea, Grilli invited professional and non-professional performers with a refugee background to just breath into a cone-shaped device in a room filled with steam. Due to the fact that the performers had experienced first hand the risk of suffocation or drowning the work enphasisez on the precariousness of human life.
Work
Major exhibitions
2017 A House Halfway, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo , Torino, I
In 2016 she was recipient of the Premio NY promoted by Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in collaboration with the Italian Academy and the Columbia University in New York. In 2013 she won the Nettuno d'oro in Bologna. In 2010 she won the Terna Prize in Rome and she was nominated for the Fritschly prize, Het Domein Museum. In 2009 she was awarded the Nuove Arti award by the Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna. In 2008 she was nominated for the Emerging Talents Award, Strozzina Foundation, Florence and she won the Italian Wave award at Artissima, Turin. In 2007 she was recipient of the ICEBERG prize in Bologna and in 2006 she won the International Performance Award at the Centrale Fies, Dro.
