Vanessa Safavi. Photo by Wilkosz and Way
When describing an exhibition, there is the inauspicious necessity of translating what one saw into words. With Vanessa Safavi, this verges on the unthinkable. “Describing my artistic practice is very personal, it starts with my biography.”
Born in Lausanne to a Swiss mother and a French-Persian father, she grew up roaming the globe and developed an interest in ethnography and anthropology. Yet, even at 17, her artistic ambitions were already evident and she began renting a studio, before attending École cantonale d’art de Lausanne – one of Switzerland’s most esteemed art schools. Despite her obvious talent, after she graduated in 2007, she decided against immediately pursuing an art career, and went on yet another jaunt across the world. “I’m only maturing as an artist now,” she says. “Up to this point I’ve still been looking.”
As such, it is only in her recent exhibition in São Paulo, “cloud metal cities” (2014), that her connection to travel has begun to emerge. Prior to this show, she lived in the Brazilian capital on a one-month residency, and found inspiration in the gentrification that gripped the city as it prepared to host the 2014 World Cup. The result is a collection that abstractly reflects this changing urban environment, with rolled sheets of aluminium reminiscent of the brand new city skyscrapers that sprang up in São Paulo’s former-shanty town districts, and the blue lights a reminder of digital connectivity. Scattered around the space were pieces of paper documenting brief encounters between strangers, expressing the transience of social relations under these oppressive new circumstances.
cloud metal cities, 2014. Aluminium sheets, silicones. Variable dimensions. Courtesy the artist and Kunsthalle São Paulo, Brazil.
Taken from Sleek 44 – What Women Want
Interview by Alicia Reuter
Read more interviews and find out more about Sleek 44