Giorgia Volpe: Gestures that traverse places

Abstract

In this interview, Giorgia Volpe reflects on nearly three decades of artistic practice between Brazil, Canada, and other territories, understanding her work as a “living cartography” shaped by displacement, gestures, materials, memories, and relationships. The artist discusses the organization of her practice around a constellation of gestures—walking, carrying, moving, weaving, waiting, and inhabiting—and explores how the body and ordinary materials can transform spaces of passage into places of presence, intimacy, and welcome. The conversation also addresses her collaborative and participatory processes, in which unpredictability, reciprocity, and encounter become constitutive elements of the work. Reflecting on memory, ephemerality, and the archive, Volpe understands photography, video, and the book not simply as forms of documentation, but as means of reactivating experiences and allowing gestures to circulate again. Finally, the interview considers the micropolitics of gesture and public art as ways of producing new forms of engagement with shared space, emphasizing presence, attention, and the capacity to act collectively.