{"id":6859,"date":"2026-06-29T15:04:39","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T13:04:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studiorizoma.org\/?p=6859"},"modified":"2026-06-29T15:13:57","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T13:13:57","slug":"fiori-di-passaggio-fsr-in-conversation-with-mattea-perrotta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studiorizoma.org\/pt-pt\/editorial\/fiori-di-passaggio-fsr-in-conversation-with-mattea-perrotta\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiori di Passaggio – FSR in conversation with Mattea Perrotta"},"content":{"rendered":"

This interview with Mattea Perrotta<\/strong> explores a practice shaped by memory, material traces, and the quiet poetics of care. Developed during her residency at Teatro Garibaldi<\/span><\/span><\/strong> with Fondazione Studio Rizoma<\/span><\/span><\/strong>, her research moves between painting and lived experience, drawing inspiration from places such as the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo<\/span><\/span> and the wider landscape of Palermo<\/span><\/span>. These reflections feed into her upcoming exhibition at Galerie Au Passage<\/span><\/span>, unfolding through a process guided less by certainty than by attention, intuition, and lingering questions.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Your work often revolves around memory, burial and funerary ornamentation. How did these themes become central to your artistic practice?<\/strong>
My work didn’t begin with death. It began as a way of making sense of difficult experiences when I was younger. Painting became somewhere to put people, places and things I couldn’t quite understand. I’ve always preferred things that refuse to explain themselves. Mystery keeps me interested. Burial traditions fascinated me because they’re full of small acts of care. Flowers, textiles, ornaments, burial cloths, they’re all ways of looking after someone. I’m interested in how materials continue carrying traces of people long after they’ve disappeared.<\/p>\n

During your residency you began your research at the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo. What drew you to this particular place?<\/strong>
I first visited the catacombs eight years ago and left feeling speechless. That’s usually enough to make me want to come back. What stayed with me wasn’t only the bodies, but the clothing, the hair, the skin, the small personal objects. It stopped feeling like a place about death and became a place about care. We go there to look at them, but I’m not entirely convinced the arrangement isn’t the other way around.<\/p>\n

What role do flowers play in this research?<\/strong>
Flowers seem quite sensible to me. They don’t mind becoming something else. They bloom, stain, collapse and return to the earth without much fuss. They’ve always accompanied celebration and mourning. After visiting the catacombs, I couldn’t stop thinking the bodies looked like flowers. It wasn’t something I expected.<\/p>\n

Alongside the catacombs, you also spend time at Palermo’s Botanical Garden. How do these two places speak to each other?<\/strong>
They don’t feel very different to me. One looks after the dead, the other the living. Both ask for patience. Both remind you that preservation and change are perfectly capable of existing together. Flowers seem to move comfortably between the two.<\/p>\n

How does your work connect to Palermo and the Mediterranean area?<\/strong>
My family is from southern Italy and I’ve spent much of the last decade living here, so it’s shaped the way I look at things. Palermo carries its history very openly. You notice it in the buildings, the gardens, the conversations, the plants. Growing up in California, where history often disappears quite quickly, made me appreciate places that are happy to let old things remain.<\/p>\n

Palermo is a city where different histories and cultures coexist. How has spending time here changed your perspective?<\/strong>
Palermo doesn’t seem interested in choosing one history over another. Everything simply stays. I think paintings behave in much the same way. I don’t really like erasing things. Older layers have usually earned the right to remain.<\/p>\n

The residency contributes to your upcoming exhibition at Galerie Au Passage in Paris. How does this experience become part of that larger project?<\/strong>
Research behaves much better once you leave the library. Walking through a place, noticing the light, collecting a fallen leaf, smelling a flower, all of that teaches me something that books can’t. I work quite instinctively, so experience is usually part of the process.<\/p>\n

You are the first artist to develop a residency project at Teatro Garibaldi since Fondazione Studio Rizoma began stewarding the space. How has working in this context influenced your process?<\/strong>
The theatre has a very particular presence. Every morning I’d walk through it on my way to the studio and feel as though the building had already been awake for quite some time. I never really felt alone there. It made me pay closer attention.<\/p>\n

Many cultural spaces today are caught between institutionalisation, economic pressures and the desire to remain genuinely open to experimentation. From your experience at Teatro Garibaldi, what conditions do artists need for a cultural space to become more than a venue?<\/strong>
Time helps.
I work quite chaotically, and my studio usually looks as though something has happened. I need room for mistakes, wandering around and changing my mind. The interesting part often arrives long before the finished work does.<\/p>\n

Fondazione Studio Rizoma conceives culture as a space for questioning dominant narratives and imagining alternative ways of inhabiting the world. How do you see your work contributing to these broader conversations?<\/strong>
I’m suspicious of certainty. It tends to arrive too early. I don’t think paintings owe us conclusions. I’m interested in ordinary materials, flowers, textiles, pigments, that carry histories with them. If the work encourages someone to look a little longer or leave with a better question than they arrived with, that’s enough for me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This interview with Mattea Perrotta explores a practice shaped by memory, material traces, and the quiet poetics of care. Developed during her residency at Teatro Garibaldi with Fondazione Studio Rizoma, her research moves between painting and lived experience, drawing inspiration from places such as the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo and the wider landscape of Palermo. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6868,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studiorizoma.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6859"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studiorizoma.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studiorizoma.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studiorizoma.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studiorizoma.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6859"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/studiorizoma.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6869,"href":"https:\/\/studiorizoma.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6859\/revisions\/6869"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studiorizoma.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studiorizoma.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studiorizoma.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studiorizoma.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}