LIVIA CHIFFI

INTERVIEW BY MARTA FRANCESCHINI

PHOTO BY FEDERICA COCCIRO

I work with deadstock fabrics, which I call “sleeping.” The fabric is there, as if asleep, not dead. I like the idea that it is just waiting much better. Now I get my deadstock fabrics mainly from a gentleman who had an old trousseau store. Because of the layout of the store, a lot of these fabrics are stuck, you can't get them easily. When I go to visit my family, I always come by and find fabrics that I may have been eyeing long ago but couldn't get my hands on. It's like everything picks itself, I just have to know how to wait, and then reason with the material and see it as part of a bigger process.

In the summers I spent in the country house I was constantly confronted with the dimension of dreams and the rawness of life. My grandmother loved to tell stories and, in this safe and beautiful place, she would tell us about brigands, about children who fell into the well, and it was impossible to discern reality from myth. And then there was the everydayness of the countryside: playing with a goat that was then eaten, or seeing a kitten run over by a car. A context in which nature lives and dies with incredible force, and this marked my way of seeing life: as something nature selects for you.

See for example fabrics: touching them and cutting them was a whole different discovery than using them on a daily basis, and that creates a very strong bond. It is not obvious, because it is not easy to enter into such an intimate relationship with the material you use for a work. 

Livia Chiffi is an artist of Salento origin, born in Gallarate (VA) in June 1997. In 2017 she began her path by devoting herself to illustration and inaugurating the exhibition “Ad occhi chiusi,” set up at the Convitto Palmieri in Lecce (August 2019). In 2023 Livia began a research work on the textile world, which she deepens in university and brings back to the artistic field through the realization of sculptures in discarded fabrics. The artist selects and assembles fabrics from markets and old warehouses in an organic research that starts from her own experience and childhood nostalgia to arrive at the concretization of strongly symbolic and delicate elements. Livia currently lives and works between Milan and Turin and runs a private studio in the Sabaudian city.

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