FRANCESCA ALDEGANI (The Space Around Me)
- Lucie Blaze
- Jan 17
- 4 min read
visual artist, installation artist, researcher, educator
Francesca does not begin from form. She begins from relation: between bodies and objects, between time and attention, between what is seen and what insists on remaining unseen. Her practice unfolds in the space around things, around the self, around materials, around
inherited structures of knowledge, treating that space as
active rather than absent.
Trained in site-specific art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Francesca’s work resists the clean separations often imposed by academic frameworks. Sculpture, installation, textile, ritual action, sound, and collective participation do not function as distinct categories, but as permeable modes of inquiry. Her installations are not statements; they are conditions. Situations in which perception is slowed, orientation is unsettled, and meaning is allowed to surface gradually rather than being delivered.
The mirror as threshold
A formative project emerged after her diploma: a site-specific installation in Sigmund Freud’s
former practice in Vienna. During research, Francesca encountered a historical coincidence.
In 1887, the same year Freud introduced psychoanalysis, Rev. John Joseph Hooker in England
patented the non-reversing mirror, a device that reflects the viewer as others see them.
She recognised this as a point of tension. Psychoanalysis, with its focus on interpretation,
projection, and the construction of identity, met an optical object that disrupted habitual
self-recognition. The mirror became a threshold: between self and other, perception and
conditioning, empathy and estrangement.
Installed throughout the apartment, the mirror led visitors through a fragile system of objects, images, threads, and sculptures. A photograph of a courtyard tree, connected by a thin black thread running through the flat, ended in a precarious sculptural constellation.
Rather than confronting Freud directly, the work operated through infiltration. A quiet critique of patriarchal and phallocentric structures emerged through material choices, unstable vertical forms, stitched hair, domestic textiles, bread infused with bodily remnants. The space was retuned.
Material as collaborator
At the core of Francesca’s practice is an animistic way of working. It is a relational stance that
approaches objects, spaces, and materials as already charged, carrying memory, energy, history, and potential meaning long before the artist intervenes. This orientation asks for sustained attention, for listening long enough that materials can begin to respond.
Objects in her work participate in the emergence of meaning. Stones, fabric, hair, copper, found industrial remnants insist on relation rather than illustration.
“I don’t decide immediately what something is,” she says. “Sometimes it stays with me for years before it tells me how it wants to exist.”
Meaning unfolds through proximity, repetition, and time spent together. Time becomes a crucial medium. In embroidered texts or stitched surfaces, language slows to the pace of the body. A sentence written by hand over weeks or months carries a different weight than one printed instantly. Viewers do not simply read words; they read labour, duration, and attention.
This sensitivity to time places her practice in quiet opposition to the acceleration of contemporary art production, the pressure to explain, circulate, and consume work rapidly.
Information arrives gradually, often after experience rather than before it. The work asks to be
felt before it is understood.
Intuition, meditation, and unlearning
Meditation functions in her practice as a methodology. Through long-term meditation, she
accesses what she calls information, insights that arrive concretely and demand translation into material space. “It’s not about inventing,” she reflects. “It’s about staying clear enough not to distort what comes.”
Authorship loosens. Control gives way to precision. This position places her at odds with dominant modes of artistic legitimacy that privilege intellectual framing over embodied knowledge. In her view, intuition and felt sense are not indulgences, but epistemologies.
Part of her post-academic process involved unlearning the compulsion to
over-explain. Not every work needs to answer questions.
Feminism, care, and material ethics
Textiles occupy a central place in Francesca’s work as a deliberate political choice. Embroidery, stitching, and fabric are treated as technologies of time, care, and resistance. Historically dismissed as “women’s work,” these practices carry deep political memory: spaces where women gathered, organised, and reshaped social structures under the guise of domestic labour.
Francesca does not adopt these materials to compensate for perceived weakness, nor to
perform masculinity through scale or aggression. Instead, she insists on their inherent power.
Slowness becomes strength, and care becomes structure.
This extends to her material ethics. She actively avoids unnecessary consumption, choosing
reused, found, or low-impact materials whenever possible. Ecofeminism, for her, is a
responsibility: an awareness of how materials are sourced, used, and returned. The earth is not
something to conquer, but something to enter into a relationship with.
Collective activation
While much of Francesca’s work begins in solitude, many projects require collective activation. Workshops, rituals, and participatory processes are not supplementary; they are integral. In one ongoing project, participants bring pieces of wood that are transformed together through copper, becoming part of an ever-growing sculptural “fire.”
The final form is important, but not more important than the energy accumulated through
shared attention; the work cannot exist without multiplicity. Collective presence generates
density, resonance, and unpredictability.
Space as protagonist
Francesca works under the name The Space Around Me. The phrase is relational. The space
around her includes others, histories, projections, and unseen forces. Space is not a container for objects; it is the primary subject.
In her installations, void and form are equally active. The arrangement of works is always
strategic, responsive to architecture, context, and co-existing bodies.
This sensitivity extends beyond galleries. Works placed in landscapes, border zones, or
abandoned sites respond to environmental conditions like humidity, decay, erosion. In one
project using fragments of the US–Mexico border wall, the material was allowed to disintegrate naturally, echoing the instability of the political structure it once enforced.
What remains
Francesca’s work aims to plant seeds rather than deliver conclusions.
Her hope is modest and radical: that each viewer arrives already as fertile ground, and that the work introduces a disturbance small enough to grow quietly over time. Meaning does not arrive fully formed. It continues working long after the encounter ends.
In a cultural landscape obsessed with speed, visibility, and certainty, her practice insists on
another tempo. One in which intuition is trusted, matter speaks, and the space around us
becomes a site of responsibility rather than control.
Comments