To Build A Home: ARTIST TALK with Isabella Capezio

Join us in the Mornington Peninsula Shire's Midsumma celebrations with this artist talk from Isabella Capezio. Isabella will share insights into their recent public art commission, To Build a Home, exploring the stories, inspirations and creative processes behind their work, as well as the themes and ideas that shape their artistic practice.

"Queer families do not have the laid groundwork of heterosexual ones, and such complexities require resourcefulness.

As a queer person growing a family I’m reflecting on how being in a queer family asks you to weave in what materials you can find to create comfort and stability. Building a home is like a nest, built by collecting what is at hand, scraps, offcuts, fluff, twigs, spit, and dirt. The coalescence of fragile materials is reinforced through its intersection.

The home reflects environmental conditions, familial tensions, and seasonal forces. In this sense, queer is enacted, embodied and performed, queer is the affective connections created through relational ecologies, to a family that is built and not given.

Influenced by Sara Ahmed and Donna Haraway’s writing, ‘to build a home’ is a proposition for a new way of thinking about family, identity, the body and desire. The large-scale collage includes figures overlaid and overlapping on textured surfaces by blending and splicing failed photographic prints, photographs, clippings from old textbooks and test strips. ‘To build a home’ is a document that weaves together found materials with candid moments of hurt, love and connection.

When a path is not clearly laid out, when queer takes you off course, the journey is one of building and becoming."

Isabella Capezio is an artist and lecturer in photography at RMIT University living and working on stolen Wurrundjeri Woi Wurrung land. Isabella’s work and research explore ideas of failure, queerness, and nature and how alternative and expanded forms of photography can unsettle existing colonising forms of representation. Isabella is interested in experimental, process-driven and site-specific engagements with environments and their histories to address the climate crisis, extraction and colonial logics. Due to their interest in education and public collaboration, they have facilitated many workshops from photobooks, landscape photography to ceramics and cyanotypes.

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Host or Publisher Mornington Peninsula Shire Arts and Culture