Sisa Soldati | Open Studio

The Ant Project presents Sisa Soldati's Open Studio, in collaboration with guest curator Ronald Sánchez.

While wandering through the city, I move in search of interstices, gaps, and escapes. I dig into every neighborhood planter, along the sides of the train tracks, savoring how vegetation takes advantage of every oversight and crack in urban planning. I collect sharp morphologies that blend with lights and varying shades of darkness; sometimes the sky joins this mixture, sometimes traces of humanity and animality do. In these urban margins, where the project of progress unravels, pulses the darkness of the unknown—the idea of emptiness, absence, and possibility. I celebrate the chance to imagine edges and liminal landscapes, to seek that bittersweet shiver deep in the navel, like when I used to swing in the park; that mix of fear, desire, and self-regulation that inhabits dispossessed landscapes. I practice botanical disobedience—I aspire to be a thorn, a twisted root, a strange petal, an endangered plant, a hybrid creature. From that poetic practice, I am drawn to the tensions between disciplines—painting, installation, sculpture, photography—as if they were elastic fields. I imagine the coexistence of improbable and uncomfortable alliances between species and materials. During the residency, I am interested in exploring the territory, the local nature, and the city’s materials to imagine new narratives among the vegetal, the animal, and the architectural.

— Sisa Soldati