Francesca Marti / text
Multidisciplinary artist mastering the hybridization of all artistic languages, Francesca Martí is a keen observer and a sensitive personality whose visual reflection is both engaged with mankind current issues and with human complex contemporary identities. Travelling around many countries has increased her awareness and consciousness about the need of transformation and change of practices that may damage the Earth and accentuate the problems of the most vulnerable ones, key aspects that she transfers to her artworks.
Making of the camera a very useful tool and archive of ideas, she gets inspired by far landscapes (Petra caves), global events (migrating people cueing), historic symbols and figures (the Godess M’aat) or intimate personal stories (the Migrant Angel). The use of performance is part of Martí’s collaborative works with musicians, designers, artists and dance or theatre students, an essential part of her creative process where she examines human emotions, her own fantasies and, even, create fictional situations which depicts the conflicts of communication in the era of the virtual relationships.
Reflective and introspective, her Dreamers are anthropomorphic creatures that embody the inner spirit of humans imagining a better future. An extension of the Dreamers, Martí’s Believers remind us of those crowds of people that stand up and fight against poverty, war of exclusion to get their own dreams come true. Together with these sculptural touching pieces -which may also be part of photographs and pictorial installations with old intervened Satellite Dishes-, Francesca Martí has signed series of works that exemplify the crossover challenges that we are all facing, among them the contemporary forced nomadism or the failure of the utopias of progress. Cities such as New York, Berlin, Madrid, Korea and others are part of that sort of giant Babel Tower of the 21st century world (Planet of Fusions) where men and women are sometimes just a replaceable piece of the engine.
Always keeping an eye at her closer environment searching for the unexpected signs of life, Francesca Martí wonders about the immensity of the universe and is constantly looking for questions to pose. Sometimes she recycles and retakes ideas that she presents under another perspective. For example, her latest works are integrated by hundreds of single figures which she untiringly wraps up, reminding us of her acclaimed Cocoon performances, where she invites students to wrap themselves and get rid of them afterwards, symbolizing their personal freeing process.
In sum, the Borders of Reality is the natural conceptual space for Francesca Martí artistic reflection, an open invitation to dream, to imagine… or to invent another life, another future.
Pilar Ribal
April, 2020