STATEMENT
I'm a performance artist, I'm the most hybrid language in art, I stand by the thesis that is defended by anti-psychiatry. My body is the center of my questioning, it is both the object of my work and the subject of my research. My body is a way to denounce all abuse and limitations of the contemporary society regarding our bodies. I make my body available to create a living picture to share with the public. The Site’s specific installations, video installations, photos and videos are traces and art work issues from my performances.
My performances are very long and the gestures are repetitive. The repetition that I use serves as a magnifying glass of the details of our lives. Emphasis is not so much on repetition but on time. I want to share time, a moment with the audience. "Hic et nunc". At a time when the virtual allows you to do thousands of things at the same time, it's a challenge for me to hold the audience's gaze for more than ten minutes. Repetition isn't only in my movement but also in this gaze: for once they are just watching one thing repeat itself over and over. They have to adapt to a different pace. Some come only for the beginning and end up staying for several hours.
My body is at the service of an analysis and a critique of the cultural and political systems that afflict the Mediterranean and its people, in contemporary history. I work on the issues regarding the Euro-Mediterranean area. My cause is regarding the condition of women in the wider context of all the cultures of the Mediterranean and not only of the Western Society, the drama that refugees and migrants go through crossing our waters, LGBT rights and people with disabilities, and more precisely the physical and psychological precariousness, the internal hypocrisies of a social system that crushes human beings and reduces them to a carcass that drags itself into everyday life.
I consider my country Italy as in the middle of a sort of a “sandwich”: Italy is actually pressed between Africa and Europe, and it represents the “Limbo Zone” of these two opposite worlds. Italy is in the “South of Europe” and is the “North of Africa” at the same time and in the same metaphoric geographical area as a large continent, the “Eurafrica”, without borders but with all the political, economic and cultural blocks and limits.
All my work is entirely inspired and dedicated to my origins and my personal story. I integrate myself into a discourse linked to the Mediterranean. My story and my body then become metonymies of a wider vision of common history.
BIOGRAPHY
Romina De Novellis is a performance artist, born in Naples in 1982, who grew up in Rome and lives and works in Paris since 2008.
After few years dedicated to dance and theatre, she underwent a serious scooter accident in 2004. Subsequently, she lands in the performing art scene cutting off both speech and choreography from her artistic research, deciding to focus on the language of gestures, overall replacing the body in a urban environment.
In 1999, she graduates from the Royal Academy of Dance of London method (RAD certification) and continues her studies at the DAMS of the University of Rome 3, she was Luigi Squarzina's art director assistant for the Opera Theatre in Rome. In Paris, she studies anthropology (ph D) at the EHESS.Traces of her work are photos and videos shot by her husband Mauro Bordin.
Her first monograph MEDITERRANEO (2019) presents a selection of works over the last ten years dedicated to the Mediterranean. (Years in which the Mediterranean’s history and cultures suffer because of the precariousness and errors of a Western political system in crisis.)
Works by Romina De Novellis were presented in the form of live performances or exhibitions (videos, video-installations, pictures, installations) at: Kulturzentrum Faust 2019, Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea Ca’ Pesaro Venice 2018, Manifesta collateral events Palermo 2018, Fondation Villa Datris Avignon 2018, Arco Art Fair Madrid 2018, Pompeii ruins 2017, Labanque Art Center Béthune 2017, Galerie Alberta Pane Paris and Venice (solo show 2016, group show 2017 and 2018), Armory Show 2016 and 2017 and 2017, Salotto Missoni NY 2017, Poznan Biennale 2016, Artissima Fair 2016, Video Art Verona 2016, MADRE Museum Naples 2016, Cairo Biennale Something Else 2015, Espace Louis Vuitton Paris 2015, Palais de Tokyo Paris 2015, Nuit Blanche Paris (2010, 2011, 2012), FIAC Art Fair Paris 2014, Friche Belle de Mai (Marseille Cultural Capital 2013), Opening week collateral program Venice Biennale 2011, 2013 and 2017 (opening week program), Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature Paris 2013, Zico House Beirut 2012, Le 104 Paris 2011.
In 2020, her works will be soon presented at: Fondazione Cerasi Palazzo Merulana and Fondazione Romaeuropa.