Serena Vittorini (b. 1990, L’Aquila) is a Belgian-Italian artist based in Brussels. Trained in psychology and then in photography, she develops a practice that brings together installation, sculpture, photography and video.
Her work examines how ordinary objects and spaces (furniture, domestic architecture, institutional settings) organise bodies and assign places. Beneath their apparent functional neutrality, these forms prescribe postures, regulate distances and reproduce relations of power that are seldom articulated. By making, altering or diverting them, the artist renders this normativity perceptible.
Repetition, wear and constraint are its principal operators. The works do not represent these mechanisms, they activate them: slow processes in which a rule, once made tangible, may be followed, circumvented or gradually eroded. Notions held to be opposites, care and control, protection and constraint, use and resistance, prove inseparable within them.
Her current research shifts this attention from the object to the living: the question is now what it takes to keep something alive and in its place, and what that permanence costs.