Valentina Gaia Lops and Ida Barbati

https://www.valentinagaialops.com/
https://www.idabarbati.com/ 

Valentina Gaia Lops (Casorate Primo, 1986) and Ida Barbati (Isernia, 1990) are visual artists and researchers born in Italy and living in Barcelona. As a collective, they are engaged in designing community projects and artistic and cultural consultancy. Their research focuses mainly on corporal and relational politics, combining the themes of the body as a site of resistance and feminism, questioning the false dichotomy between the personal and the political. Their artistic practice is based on the realisation of collaborative creative processes. Their practice is not only aimed at formalising an exhibition result, but also at the experiential experience that is shared during the co-creation phase, where the generation of links, affections, tensions and healing is configured as the artistic-political practice itself.

In 2022 they were awarded the Unzip 22 Visual Arts grant (El Prat de Llobregat) in the category of image and society, with the artistic research project Cuerpos en escucha. Since then, they have taken the project to different spaces (Betevé, El Prat radio station and Jiser/Migrant Knowledge) and have organised workshops and experimental laboratories (Jardins de la Pau Civic Centre, El Prat de Llobregat). In May 2023 they are taking part in the Festival Social coordinated by the Associació Cultural TuDanzas and in October 2023 they will be part of the Festival FAACCC, in Fabra i Coats (Barcelona).

In March 2023, they curated the exhibition Habitar los Márgenes, at the Centre Cívic de la Barceloneta (Barcelona).

As individual artists, on the one hand, Ida Barbati studied Visual Arts at the Laba in Florence (2028). She completed a Master's degree in Arts and Education at the University of Barcelona (2020) and a Master's degree in Philosophy for Contemporary Art at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona (2022). She is currently a student on the Art and Education doctoral programme at the University of Barcelona. In her artistic practice she explores different media, in particular installation, performance and intervention both in images and in public spaces. The body is a common thread running through her work and is understood as a porous materiality that carries a strong poetic and political charge. This is why her line of research develops from those affects, experiences and memories that pass through her body and that are imbued with feminist politics and theories.

She has been interested in developing an artistic practice based on collaborative and participatory processes since 2021.

On the other hand, Valentina is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher and Queer curator.

Her practice is positioned at the intersection between art, gender and territory and combines, through a dissident methodology, multiple artistic languages among which visual arts, performance and social action predominate. Valentina founded the artistic collective LiberArte, created in March 2022 through the residency programme of the Centre Cívic Can Verdaguer. The collective focuses on the study of multidisciplinary processes and the development of participatory artistic practices. Valentina is currently coordinating various spaces for artistic co-creation and experimentation and collaborates in research projects with art centres, universities and cultural spaces in the city of Barcelona as an artist-researcher, curator, trainer and workshop leader. Her work covers a wide variety of contexts, which allows her to immerse herself in different creative dynamics and contribute to the enrichment of the artistic and cultural panorama of the city.

Presentation updated in September 2023