Bio

Francesca Orelli works primarily in collage, cutting and pasting by hand found paper, pages from discarded books, maps, and other paper materials that she collects and archives. The works carry the provenance of their materials, and arise from a reflection on the exercise of living, articulated through themes such as identity, gender, nature, and relations between cultures.

She trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she followed the studio art courses, earning her BFA at Tufts University. During her training years, she had the good fortune to take the film courses of Argentine director Fernando Birri, one of the founders of the Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, and of Peruvian poet José Antonio Mazzotti — an encounter that contributed decisively to her formation, introducing an attentiveness to montage, storytelling through images, and the political dimension of narrative. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions in Italy and the United States. She recently collaborated with Oscalito Showroom in Turin on a solo exhibition conceived in dialogue with the sustainability values upheld by Slow Fiber.

In the years before her education in America, she studied piano at the Conservatorio Mariotti in Perugia. The method she absorbed through her study of the instrument — repetition, listening, and structural analysis — continues to shape the way she works with collage.