E18 Francesca Grilli

Francesca Grilli is a Brussels-based Italian artist whose main practice is performance art; however, she also works with sculpture, film, audio and other media, as well as esoteric practices. The scope of her artistic research is quite broad but the core of her work is focused on different facets of the human condition: age, fragility, family ties, power relations, among others. In her multiple poetic and intimate artworks, she seeks to provoke honest, thoughtful and almost cathartic public reactions through presenting the viewers and participants with profound experiences. These include being put in a dark room together with trained birds of prey or being presented with two pianists of stark age contrast, one of whom is a hundred years old and the other, a child. The power and purity of childhood is also at the centre of her latest work, Sparks (2021), in which she invites the audience for a palm reading session with children as oracles. Francesca Grilli’s project Sparks is presented by Contemporary Locus and supported by the Italian Culture Council.