Anna Franceschini

Anna Franceschini (Pavia, IT, 1979) investigates objects, artefacts, commodities and their modes of display to rediscuss their role and configuration in the horizon of the aesthetics of capital. Underlying her investigation of reality is cinema through its constituent elements: movement, light, framing and editing. Kinetic sculptures, performances, bachelor machines, and photocopies are for the artist a cinema made by other means.Franceschini’s current work seeks to expand the concept of animation in sculptural terms. Reversing the terms of the discussion about "cinema as machine," the artists seeks to redirect the gaze toward the hypothesis of a "machine as cinema." By creating sculptural moving images, she turns commodities into quasi living beings and fabricates apparatuses whose subjectivity is emphasised within a mise-en-scène.
Her films without film, made of machines and utensils, reflect on contemporaneity as a panorama of spectacular objects: in the womb of late capitalism, motorised accidents, animated byproducts of industrial processes become spectacle.Anna Franceschini holds a PhD in Visual and Media Studies and teaches at IULM University in Milan. Since 2022, she is Art-based Researcher for AN-ICON, a research group funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and hosted by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan.

Her videos and films have been presented in several festivals, including: Rotterdam Film Festival; Locarno Film Festival; Torino Film Festival, Courtisane in Ghent and Vilnius Film Festival.
In 2017 her project CARTABURRO won the Italian Council grant, promoted by the Ministry of Culture. In 2019 she made the short film BUSTROFEDICO, a special project for the Italian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. She is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee for the year 2022.

She had a solo exhibition at the Trienniale of Milan in 2023 (All Those Stuffed Shirts) .In 2022 at Campoli Presti in Paris (Il salotto cattivo), in 2022 at Vistamarestudio in Milano (Did you know you have a broken glass in the window?), in 2018 at Almanac Inn in London and at Almanac in Turin (Cartaburro ), in 2015 with André Romao at Vera Cortes in Lisbon (Before they break, before they due, they fly!), in 2014 curated by M. Farronato at Fiorucci Art Trust in London( Lezioni d’italiano), in 2013 curated by A. Viliani at the Italian Cultural Institute Paris(Splendid is the ligh in the city of night), in 2011 curated by M. Farronato with R. Selvaggio at Volcano Extravaganza in Stromboli (Lets’s Fuuuuck! I’ll fuck anything that mooooves!).

Her work featured in several group exhibitions including the most recent one: Amigos y Amigas, curated by Fabio Cherstich at Palazzo Tiepolo in Venice (2024).Prior to this: The Uncanny House, curated by Ilaria Marotta e Andrea Baccin, Casa di Goethe, Rome (2023); French Exit at Emanuela Campoli in Paris (2023); JET SET (performance), curated by with Chiara Bertini and Fanny Borel at MUDAM in Luxembourg (2023); DIARIO NOTTURNO. DI SOGNI, INCUBI E BESTIARI IMMAGINARI, curated by Joel Valabrega and Clementine Proby at MAXXI (2023); After laughter comes tears, curated by J. Valabrega at Mudam in Luxembourg (2023); Anna Franceschini e Nanda Vigo, Passeggiate intergalattiche at Vistamare in Pescara (2023); Extase de L’Abîme, curated by Cristiano Raimondi at Società delle Api in Monaco (2022); Sartor Resartus, curated by Jeppe Ugelvig at Huset for Kunst og Design in Holstebro (2021); Smoke and mirrors curated by Joao Laia at DAMA in Turin (2017).

Several institutional collections include her work such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, the MAXXI and the MACRO in Rome, GAMeC in Bergamo and the Nicoletta Fiorucci Collection in London.