Vanessa Safavi Swiss, b. 1980

Vanessa Safavi works with a variety of materials but with a predominance for all types of rubber, often returning to post-minimalist practices. She invites unexpected materials such as silicone, appealing to the legacy of “soft sculpture” or the “Antiform” movement, which uses industrial materials in a more sensitive way. 

Safavi also displays a respect for cultural references dating back to antiquity and explores various cultural heritages. By translating ancient techniques and symbols Safavi associates them with her own personal narratives, she explores and questions the contemporary identity of the body in the constant optimization of technologies and its cultural impacts in our hyper-organized societies that have definitely led it to a new sphere of identity and a complex, vulnerable and schizophrenic fragility. Her work reminds us of the fragility of our bodies and the poetry that emerges from them.

Beyond the analogy to the skin and the body, silicone has the characteristic, like many other polymers, of being a hybrid material, which, as Barthes said, transforms as it passes from one state to another and thus suggests a metaphysical particularity. It is also through this more abstract spectrum that the artist develops his plastic research around silicone.