Camilla Gurgone was born in Lucca in 1997. From 2016 to 2019 she attended the Sculpture programme at Rome University of Fine Arts and, before obtaining her diploma, undertook thesis research abroad at UPV/EHU in Bilbao. She currently works between Rome, Milan and Tuscany. She works mainly with installations preceded by performative actions or participatory projects designed around the audience, whom she challenges and encourages to get involved. Her work begins with the desire to record her everyday life while removing the element of reality and replacing it with fiction, transforming a moment of real life into a moment created ad hoc. By artificially reproducing environments and situations, the viewer finds themselves inside an alienating and engaging illusion, to the point of becoming the co-director of a social experiment with their own freedom and total subjectivity, suspended between risk and safety, trust and mistrust.
Easy and effective! Camping edition
We all know how to read words, no one knows how to read minds.
Writing down what I think is frightening, it means making it public, visible, ready for the judgement of others. What you write remains there, imprinted, it is a statement you cannot escape from; hiding it among your thoughts, instead, allows you to remember it differently each time, to ‘dust it off’ whenever you want and make it ‘disappear’ when you are unable to manage yourself.
I got lost among the structures of a thousand Camillas unable to come to terms with their own past and their own story, precisely because I have never told this ‘story’, in fact, I have never even told it to myself.
The latest series of my installations called Easy and Effective! (2019-2020) almost seems to offer a conclusion to this research: a parallel universe where we are able to erase whatever we want from our memory, thereby gaining control over time, over the effects of our decisions, and over mistakes.
In a certain sense, making choices during our lives almost becomes pointless because, in the event of an ‘error’, we have the possibility of carrying out a ‘cache’ clean-up, freeing ourselves from fear of the future, the past and the opinions of others.
