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. 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.
Bio
Their work has been recently exhibited and screened in venues such as Sonnenstube (CH), The Clemente (US), Marres (NL), Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (DE), Page Not Found (NL), WORM (NL), Filmhuis Den Haag (NL), Beursschouwburg (BL). Research and writing is also a key part of their artistic practice; they took part in various publications, as the academic journal Kunstlicht (NL), Eurozine and the magazine Robida (IT); they participated in artist readings or talks as at Page not found (NL) or Radio Mushroom (NL) and they were involved in research and reading groups (IF I CAN’T DANCE, NL). Their work was awarded by the KABK Master Thesis Award, the KABK Artistic Research Award, Stroom Pro Invest and Mondriaan Kunstenaar Start. They are also part of the artist-run filmlab and collective Filmwerkplaats in Rotterdam, a group of artists that focus on the use of analogue film in contemporary art practices. In 2022 they were awarded the fellowship of Cripta747 Residency Programme in Turin (IT), where they were developing a new film investigating the languages of childhood, the power of silence and other forms of non-verbal communication used as gestures of refusal.