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In paintings, installations and rehearsals, Andrea Celeste La Forgia (1995) interweaves family history with archival research into class struggle. She explores how social class constrains lives and creative space, and how that space might be reclaimed.
Pasta Is No Longer the Past (2025) consists of an installation and daily rehearsals in which text and small choreographic gestures come together. Sheets of lasagne hang in a long line along the wall. Following this rhythmic trail, La Forgia unfolds a narrative about labour, imagination, loss and resistance.
The work is the result of a long-term collaboration with the artist’s mother, who has worked in a pasta factory in Italy for decades. Together, they search for traces of her creative voice, which was suppressed by factory labour. The sheets of lasagne hang low, at the height of the machine her mother works with. Some bear drawings and texts from a diary she kept as a young woman; as if imagination were breaking through the repetitive production process. At the end of the line are a few plastic containers, containing hidden pages of a script.
For La Forgia, these rehearsals are not performances but open exercises in language and movement. Repetition, an instrument of efficiency in the factory, here becomes a means of slowing down, of playing, and of finding new forms. Tensions also surface: between mother and daughter, between factory worker and artist, between proximity and distance. The result is a dialogue about loss, class betrayal and guilt, but also an encounter within the shared space and context of a rehearsal.
Written by Sarah van Binsbergen