Artist statement
Adele Dipasquale (IT, 1994) is a visual artist and researcher currently based in The Hague (NL), where they have graduated from the MA Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Arts KABK in 2020. Working across various mediums as moving images, analog film, voice experimentations and writing, their work questions the limits of cultural binarism – from femininity to naturality, from fiction to facts – and explores language. Their artistic practice deals with the politics of language and the relationship between magic and words. Their research starts from a deep inquiry of the power of naming: how words produce worlds and allow for certain things to exist and not for others. In their practice they investigate how linguistic constructs shape reality, how they operate and how they can be both tools of oppression and resistance. In this process, they try to look for strategies of refusal and, possibly, reparation from normative definitions and taxonomies. Many of their works use some forms of defiance of language and representation as a first spark. Fueled by feminist theory, their practice operates through key concepts as prophetic culture and magical thought. Magical thought problematizes a binary idea of fiction and truth. What is considered real and what is not, namely the separation between facts and fables, is the first act of worlding. Magic troubles this distinction as conventionally conceived: it’s a form of refusal, an effective word, an act of worldmaking and another cosmology. The power of words to shape reality — as a spell makes something appear or disappear— is, for them, the most powerful and evident form of magic. Inspired by magical practises as a methodological tool, but also as a joyful invitation, their work tries to challenge fixed notions of meanings using miswords, miscomprehension, language games and the never-fixed boundary between sound and voice.