Francesca GrilliContact details: www.francescagrilli.com This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Bergstraat 16. 2009. Video installation, mirror, sound.  Francesca Grilli’s work often has its origins in a suggestion intercepted in the physical space, in a detail spotted during a casual encounter or recovered from a memory of the past. Subsequently abstracted into performances and video works, the artist creates from those minimal elements a new experience for the viewer, one in which a single gesture, sound, or event has the power to raise a new sense of awareness of reality and a chain of thoughts. As a result of this residency program, Grilli presents the video installation Bergstraat 16 at the Historical Museum of Amsterdam. The title of the work is the address of the artist’s studio, where 50 years ago, in May 1959, the prostitute Truus Krieger was murdered. Inspired by the chance discovery of this incident, the artist decided to create a personal ritual to commemorate Truus’s death. Along the notes of “De gestorvene”, Grilli invites the viewer to accompany her in this act of remembrance. However, as we proceed and see our own image refracted and fragmented in space, and we struggle to keep clear the borders between our own body and the one of the artist, we soon realize that we are not only witnessing a new funeral ritual, we are becoming part of a rite of self-discovery and analysis. Besides commenting on the tragic destiny of a woman, on the transient and ephemeral nature of life, on the relationships between memory, body and place, this work sheds compelling light on the delicate, vulnerable relationship each person has with his/her own inner self, and eventually with another intimate ‘other’. Biography: Francesca Grilli (b. in 1978, Bologna, Italy) lives and works in Amsterdam. She graduated at ISIA, Urbino, Italy and attended the Advanced Course in Visual Arts at Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy in 2005. Between 2006 and 2008 she was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.
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Participating Artists
