Ghitti. Altri alfabeti-Other alphabets

Franca Ghitti was born and spent her childhood in Erbanno in Valcamonica where her family owned a large sawmill. There she learned to conceive of sculpture as a concrete form that establishes "points of contact " between the deep roots of a community and contemporary culture. Ghitti trained at Brera Academy in Milan, attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, and the course in engraving directed by Kokoschka in Salzburg. From 1969 to 1971 Ghitti lived and worked in Kenya on behalf of the Foreign Office. Contact with numerous tribal cultures clarified for her the value of formal codes as sediments, non-verbal alphabets or "other alphabets." Since then her challenge has been to tackle her own age, serial technologies and languages, reinfusing them with a rhythm of essential elements as stratified sequences of forged forms and wood and iron scraps. Franca Ghitti intends sculpture as an alphabet that attempts to mend lost forms of communication with gestures that gather and recompose scattered elements as if they were fragmented words to reassemble in a discourse. Her installations transform geometrical space into historical space, reinventing sculpture space as a territorial deposit and archive.