DAVIDE HJORT DI FABIO
Words by Caroline Ryan
Curated by Emil Nissen
Artwork photgraphy by Mikkel Kaldal
Often moulded on Davide’s own body, Davide Hjort Di Fabio creates transformative works exploring gender identity through a wide scope of media. Using art as a tool with which to re-learn the role of self in the world, Davide’s clay sculptures capture a profound vitality.
Your preferred material at current is clay, how come?
I think clay is a very performative material. Since I started at the Art Academy, I've been obsessed with the transformation that clay undergoes through the forming, drying, firing and glazing process. It's like starting a performance in the kiln, you never know how it turns out! At the same time, I like to activate my sculptures and make them "alive" with other media, for example, video, sound, performance, and photography. Right now, I'm showing two installations at the group exhibition Soil. Sickness.Society at Kunsthal Rønnebæksholm. I made three big ceramic sculptures playing a video filmed inside frozen waterfalls, lakes, and rivers in Iceland, and in the next room, I'm showing a ceramic lightbox, shaped like a cave, with a photograph leaning against the opening, taken with an over-100-years-old Kodak Brownie camera.
A lot of your work revolves around the body, and you use your body in your work. What’s the connection between you and your art, are you part of the piece?
I often use castings of my body to form my sculptures and sometimes I even form clay directly on my body. For me, it's a way to explore my queer and non-binary identity in this world. Through my art, I've been researching and expanding my boundaries, and actually re-learning my gender identity in a way that feels right to me and my body. So my sculptures are vulnerable beings, but also a tool of protection. About this matter, I would like to share the sentence of the activist Alexander Leon, that really resonates with me, and inspired my recent works, "queer people don't grow up as ourselves, we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimise humiliation and prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us and which parts we've created to protect us."
You're starting your masters this autumn, will you keep exploring clay or dive into a new material?
I'm so excited to start my master the school of sculpture. My plan is to still work with clay but on a bigger scale. I would love to make life-size sculptures! I am also very open to trying new materials like marble, stone, and bronze castings, and maybe integrate them into my installations.
What inspires your work?
In general, I'm inspired by both personal and historical sources. I'm fascinated by human relationships and their complexity. Confrontation. The nature around my hometown. Mountains and rivers. My memory and my generational memory, my grandparents, their stories and their gestures. They are tailors and come from a generation where they would never consider themselves artists, but for me, they have been very brave in their life choices and I wish I could have just a bit of their strength. My grandmother was born in 1941 and she lived the first years of her life inside a cave in the mountains because the Nazis were constantly bombing our town. Right now I'm very inspired by the author and performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon, the Austrian artist Franz West, Sergei Parajanov's movies, David Attenborough, Instagram memes and Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Music-wise I'm listening to a lot of the American jazz musician and composer, Alice Coltrane, the French Baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau and Cantu a tenore, the polyphonic folk singing characteristic of Sardinia.
Lastly, why do you want to be an artist?
Because art gives you a very specific lens through which to observe the world. I studied at the University for five years before starting at the Academy, and I always felt that something was missing. Through the years I realised that it's much more thrilling, challenging, and unrestrained to research our world and society through art rather than with academic essays. I cannot be anything else fully but an artist.
Portrait Photgraphy by Lizette Mikkelsen