Bringing Worlds into the World

This conversation took place a few days after the opening of the Pink for Flower show and book presentation at Lateral Roma in November 2024. For us, it offers an opportunity to finally put into words some of the thoughts from the ongoing dialogue we’ve been nurturing since we met in 2021.

The show resonates with the key issues at stake in Caterina’s practice, providing a new opportunity to reflect on some of the core ideas that drive her work: the search for an open subject, experimentation with movement and ritual, and the exploration of the power structures of language—concepts we’ve been trying to convey throughout our conversation.

Anna Cestelli Guidi: Let’s start by talking about your last exhibition at Lateral Rome, Pink for Flower, where you displayed the series of paintings entitled O, from 2019–2020. I found your way of setting up the works in the space very interesting, with the large canvases hung directly on the wall, without stretchers, attached to each other. Indeed, the feeling was of one large immersive installation where the individual canvases resonated with one another, encompassing the viewer. This unconventional way of dealing with painting has characterised your research for years. While this might partly be influenced by the demands of a nomadic life, as yours has been in recent years, I believe it is more the expression of a desire to strip away those elements that confine painting to a specific medium. It searches for a different space of possibilities where painting becomes part of a wider world, opening up to diverse contaminations.

Caterina Silva: The cycle O was created between London and Rome in 2019–2020, an intense period marked by riots, repressions (Chile, Iran…) and environmental catastrophes. I vividly recall images of the Australian bushfires and the viral videos of thirsty kangaroos knocking at doors. There was a feeling of impending disaster, mixed with exhilaration for the energies released by bodies in the streets. Then the pandemic struck, normalising this end-of-the-world state. 

The paintings reflect this feeling, combined with my reading of the Book of Genesis and Kashmiri Shaivite Tantric texts. They were painted using methods and techniques I was experimenting with at the time. The canvases lay on the floor as I moved around them, performing actions, gestures, and erasures. I often used frottage to bring to the surface the material underneath the canvas, literally drawing the external world (life, objects) into the subject. I see those canvases as portals connecting realities—ecstatic spaces for experiencing an outer dimension. The fact that these operations resulted in a painting was not my primary concern. You might view this as a naïve denial of the issues surrounding painting’s history, but it also critiques that very history—written by male geniuses celebrated for their brilliant, modern, structured, and uncontaminated selves.

The stretcher, this architecture that elevates, closes, and isolates, was left to its history or perhaps simply forgotten amidst my displacements. During those years of travel, I prioritised actions, materials, and the pleasure of letting the outside world enter within. When Marta Federici and I conceived the exhibition for Lateral Roma, we instinctively decided to install the canvases close together, creating a multitude where singularities could be grasped within an archipelago-constellation-panorama.

The relationship between singularity and multitude, and the resulting unforeseen resonances, relates to  your way of working in pictorial cycles—even your choice of titles for individual works often emerges through collective elaboration. The O series also marks a watershed moment in your research: the transition from experimentation with the horizontal plane to the vertical canvas. This shift seems significant—a transformation in perspective that has reshaped your painting practice. Horizontal and vertical are radically different ways of being in the world. I would venture to say the verticality you’ve embraced subverts their traditional rivalry, experimenting instead with a third possibility: one that is no longer self-referential but outward-looking and open.

Painting has always been the material body through which I deconstruct myself, dismantle norms, and put theoretical reflections and spiritual exercises into practice. 

Horizontal means letting things be—avoiding the exercise of power, seeking a reversible disappearance of the self, practising attention, listening to what may happen, and finding the most natural way for it to unfold without judgement. The canvas lies on the floor, initially thin and fragile, strengthening with layers of colour, water, weather, people, and landscapes until it becomes almost indestructible but never rigid. Sometimes I drag it outside and leave it for days. Water or snow alter marks and textures, allowing the process to begin anew.

This way of thinking about painting evolved alongside my practice of meditation and engagement with theorists and mystics on the concept of the Impersonal. The Roman legal category of Persona underlies many human hierarchies and has been historically used to dominate others, both human and non-human. Dismantling the Persona towards the Impersonal generates an open subject capable of moving beyond itself—welcoming otherness without appropriation, dissolving, and returning. This movement is horizontal, connected to the boundary loss experienced in love, political struggle, proximity to death, with certain substances and in meditation (and perhaps childbirth?).

Verticalising is a next step: an attempt to exercise power without letting it crystallise into domination, accepting the responsibility of free will, choice, and representation. On the canvas before me, potential worlds of non-violent coexistence emerge. Forms interpenetrate gently, erotically, and passionately. Painting becomes a joyful, exhilarating act because it assures me that what is happening is not only utopian but also applicable to realities beyond the picture.

In these paintings there is a clear relationship between your body and the act of painting. Gesture is always important, but it seems to me that the movement of your body plays a fundamental role. Through the movements, which I perceive almost as a dance, you give shape to a personal imaginative world—or rather, a visual system to share and experiment with others, as when you invited the dancer and performer Cristina Kristal Rizzo into your studio.

When I paint on the floor, my body is crouched at the edges of the canvas. I observe water spreading, penetrating the fabric, and altering colours. A rhythm originating in my breath determines my movements.

In the vertical canvases, however, there is a different tension. Their creation resembles a ritual event. I start early in the morning and remain offline throughout. The energy employed is immense; my arms and body are stretched and tense. My actions are either very fast (often without brushes) or highly repetitive. My head gets close to my hand, and my eyes follow the movement until the image blurs. Sometimes I find myself upside-down on the ladder. Certain movements create specific marks, which may become figures or remain isolated. If they meet other signs, they merge (power, love) rather than dominate.

The process must be swift, as the colours dry quickly and the dance is interrupted. There is an erotic charge—sometimes frenzied, sometimes gentle. This event occurs in a void, a space of infinite possibilities. After four or five hours, I am exhausted, but the paintings are always completed in a single session. I see this ritual also as a way to master attention and to reflect on its scarcity.

In 2011, I invited choreographer Cristina Kristal Rizzo to paint on my behalf. She was supposed to translate gestures and signs from my pictorial alphabet onto the canvas. The verbal translation was impossible, so Cristina was free to improvise. I later created a series of paintings of the same dimensions, using the colors’ left over, the techniques she had found and the residual energy from our meetings. The work was regulated by a contract. Cristina had never painted before.

This project, initially titled The Punk Sister of Agnes Martin, evolved into Paintings from Paradise. Paradise was this shared liminal space—a place where identities blurred without merging, and new languages emerged.

As an avid reader and lover of words, you have a profound sensitivity to language and the power dynamics it carries. In your works, you often explore combinations of forms resembling phonemes of an imaginative vocabulary—lullabies of a pre-semantic phoné emphasising the sonic materiality of language to challenge the certainties of Western logos.

Your words are beautiful. The signs I use in painting form an open, ever-changing alphabet. Painting, for me, avoids direct meaning, delves into the unknown, and accepts the uncontrollable. I’ve always been captivated by texts; my memory is shaped by words and sounds, more than images. 

I believe in the magical power of language to create and transform. I’m drawn to liturgy, mantras, and sound’s ability to replace meaning ontologically. I trust philosophical writing that resists simplification, becoming poetry. I embrace opacity.

To return to the recent exhibition, the title Pink for Flower is also the title of the book of the same name published in 2022, which brings together your work from 2012 to 2020. It is a book that includes contributions from a variety of scholars and personalities who approach your work from diverse perspectives, fully realizing the facets of a practice that does not confine itself to painting but experiments with various mediums, from performance to video and sound.

The idea for the book originated in a dialogue with Lana and Alex from Bosse & Baum gallery in London, and it evolved into a collaborative work with the publishing house viaindustriae, supported financially through crowdfunding. The contributors involved come from different fields. I was interested in theoretical interventions that could evoke fragments of my research, suggesting possibilities for interpretation, even if only indirectly. Professor Raffaele Torella, one of the foremost experts on Kashmiri Shaivism, wrote about purity and impurity in the Tantric universe. Researcher and writer Dr Hannah Proctor recounted the human and artistic experience of Mary Barnes, who confronted psychiatric illness through painting. Cristina Kristal Rizzo, in poetic prose, described our 2011 painting experiment. Curators and art writers Marta Federici and Laura Smith shared more specific texts about my painting and performance practices. The title of the book, Pink for Flower, comes from artist Bea McMahon’s contribution, which quotes Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, connecting the English word “pink”—which, at the time, besides referring to the colour rose, also meant “the culmination of something” as well as “to perforate” or “pierce”—with the work of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. This text was activated by Bea and Matteo Angius in the form of a performance dialogue-translation during the opening night at Lateral Roma. I am curious of any medium, but I am also deeply interested in medium-specific approaches to painting.

Yet painting seems to be the continuous bassline that, beneath the apparent lightness of forms and colours, conceals a fundamentally political thought—a concern with positioning oneself in the world, beyond boundaries, always striving to shape new images that might “bring the world into the world.”

I think it should be quite natural to articulate artistic thoughts that resonate, more or less explicitly, with a political stance. I am rather surprised when this does not happen, for instance now with the Palestinian genocide. Aside from its artistic programming, I admire how Lateral Roma has positioned itself in respect to this. There are many discourses at stake, common struggles to address, potential for change, and realities to invent. Fires are being lit even amid the climate of violence and fascism we face both within our country and abroad.  I love freedom (sic), colours, and the trembling awareness of the disaster we inhabit. Art discourses, ritual gatherings, images, and metaphors are necessary for survival. Painting resonates with all these things, and joy itself possesses both spiritual and political power.  As Stefania Consigliere writes in her beautiful Favole del reincanto. Molteplicità, immaginario, rivoluzione.  “La fine del nostro mondo non coincide con la fine di ogni mondo possibile.”  Perhaps “bringing the world into the world” could be adapted to “bringing worlds into the world” ensuring we do not repeat the history of domination that has so often characterised humanity. Instead, we might affirm a multiplicity of possible, erotic, transformative becoming.