LINDA CARACCIOLO BORRA
LINDA CARACCIOLO BORRA
[Episode 3]
Welcome to another episode of the Creative Minds Project, with my guest Linda Caracciolo Borra (a.k.a. Linda Orbac).
Linda is a multidisciplinary artist from Como, Italy. She works in the fields of visual art, poetry, and sound. She studied fine arts at the iconic Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and then graduated with honours from Haute École des Arts du Rhin in France. Thanks to her wealth of mentors, she was encouraged to indulge in her different passions throughout her career, which include video art, performance, collage, poetry, and sound-making. And to that point, her artist statement gives a sweet homage to every teacher who has influenced her. Her practice also finds inspiration from the Russian avant-garde, Italian Futurism, Dada, and more contemporary artists like Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno. In short, Linda lives and breathes like a Gesamtkünstlerin.
I’m happy to share my conversation with Linda about her background, practice, her melodic use of language and the notebook she did for the Creative Minds Project.
Linda on Instagram for visual arts and poetry/sound
Linda’s website
Linda’s music
Q: Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your background?
A: I am originally from Italy, from the city of Como, but I have lived in different places in Europe for the last 11 years. Let’s say since 2010, starting from an exchange project in Barcelona at the time, I was studying fashion marketing at IED (Istituto Europeo di Design) in Milan. After those years, of studying and briefly working in the fashion industry, I realised my inclinations were rather oriented toward the arts. I deeply understood that some years later. My main fascination with fashion studies was the modern and contemporary art class led by art historian and art critic Loredana Parmesani, besides some cinema and semiotics classes I had back there.
Around 2011 and 2012 I started approaching collage and photography. I decided to take that a bit further by applying for an artistic residency in the South of France where I was then later admitted into a residency programme at E.N.S.P. Arles, one of the oldest photography academies in France. Over there, I could experiment with analogue film and, have to say, the static image was not enough for me. I was willing to explore as many media as possible. The experience over there was a fulfilling and enriching one, which opened me up to broader possibilities. Here is how I came closer to visual arts in terms of studies and my own practice.
Q: What was your environment like growing up? Did you have role models? Were you encouraged for creative expression? Were you exposed to lots of art? And how did it shape you as an artist?
A: I grew up in a family where textile and art were the two main components, both on the side of my mother and the side of my father. From my father's family, my great-grandfather, Pompeo Borra, was a painter, close to the Novecento Italiano artistic movement. His father, Cesare Borra, was also an eclectic figure; painter, designer, and antiquarian. One of his brothers, Luigi Borra, also known as Milo Brinn, has been a renowned circus athlete and wrestling performer. On the other side, my mother, coming from textile (with an important chemistry preparation) studies, has been working as a textile designer, painter, interior decoration artist, and fresco restorer. Nowadays our conversations are still of profound inspiration for me and she has a lot of savoir-faire in terms of painting and materials. After telling you a bit of a resumé of artistic practices in my family, I can surely tell, that I have been deeply influenced by all these personalities, especially my great-grandfather. From time to time, I leaf through some books with his writings on art and still get inspired by him. I have to say that one of his influences in my work, to this day, is the focus on colours.
One of my first strange experiences of teachers being harsh on me, was in kindergartean when I was around four years old. I was sort of punished one precise day for painting snow in purple. Back then, the teacher called my parents mentioning I might have some problems. My mother kindly replied to the teacher by inviting her for tea at our place, to make her understand that because I would see faces painted in red, blue, green, or yellow, of course, it would be normal for me to colour snow in shades of purple.
This is just to mention how sometimes a teacher whose mind is somewhat limited can be a further limitation and risk for children. I do believe all children are born as tiny little artists. The thing afterward is their own choice, to see if they would rather continue with that creative path or take some other. And this, of course, depends as well on the family environment and freedom they grow up with, I guess.
It’s not been easy at certain times. Art is a constant process of questioning oneself as well as doubting and making and discovering and being disciplined. I am thankful my parents have deeply supported me and still do, and grateful they have encouraged me through this path which is not that linear. It is not a straight line; I’d rather say it’s made of waves, periods, involving a lot of changes and determination.
Q: What was your environment like growing up? Did you have role models? Were you encouraged for creative expression? Were you exposed to lots of art? And how did it shape you as an artist?
A: Well, being sincere and straightforward, the day I was confronted with Rietveld juries (at two different occasions on the same day), considering some of the questions they posed me, I hoped that I wouldn't be accepted, since it seemed to be a problem somehow, that I had such a multidisciplinary practice already, way before entering this specific academy. They seemed to be confused and not understanding that one person could be and make many things. Then, around the 25th of June 2016, I received the final communication that I was admitted. Then, of course, I was happy, but still, so many things did not convince me about this place that I decided to quit around March 2018 to finally end my studies at Haute École des Arts du Rhin, in the city of Mulhouse.
Despite dropping out of Rietveld, I still conserve much of esteem for some teachers I had back there and with some of them, we are still in contact. It was great to be in such a multicultural, multilingual, academy. Surely it has brought me to rethinking process-based methodologies of working within the arts. I am happy I passed by there. I met great people, amazing teachers, and guest teachers and made great friends whose humanity and art I greatly appreciate.
Despite all this, I care about claiming that no academy makes an individual an artist. Either one has a predisposition, a strong propensity towards the arts already, way before a school or a school can be very risky because teachers, as all human beings, have their school of thought and tend to shape students based on their background. Plus having many teachers as tutors creates nothing but confusion in one’s head.
Q: Your practice, as you mentioned, is quite multidisciplinary. You create in visual art, music, collage, paintings, and fashion, among many others. So a) how did this happen? and b) how do all of these disciplines coexist? Do you have a primary area of focus? Are they steady streams of creativity? Does your interest peak and dip periodically? Or are the lines more blurry?
A: Yeah, true. It is a multidisciplinary practice. This happened, I think, very simply because of extreme curiosity and a will to experiment with different media and disciplines. Let’s say, as it comes to fashion, I have a bit of a habit of collecting things. I used to collect hats. I approach clothing on a performative level, perhaps. It is theatrical, it is exteriority, a sort of architectural construction for the body. Clothing and makeup are for me two ways of expressing myself, same with drawing or painting or singing. I feel well inside if I see colourful things around me.
The alternation between disciplines is quite a constant in my work. Some days I paint, some days I make music, some days I write poems or take photos. It depends. It’s quite organic the way different media alternate or intertwine. For example, lately, I have been working on a commissioned painting and I tend to use daylight as much as possible for painting and night darkness for working with sounds.
Q: On that note, what does your workday look like? Is it very structured? Do you work flexible hours? Do you work on your own? Do you have a studio? Do you listen to music? Paint me a word picture.
A: My workday starts quite early. It starts in the morning. It’s a daily practice.
It’s a sort of ora et labora practice. I wake up around 7 am, sometimes even earlier, and start working or reading depending on how I organise the day.
As mentioned before, I tend to keep visual work for the daylight and sound work for the dark. I also tend to sleep pretty early so that the day after I can be as fresh and active as possible. Currently, I don’t have a studio space in the city, but I do have an atelier/studio at my family’s place.
It is sort of a detached tiny house where I do mainly paint and make visual work. Since it is a bit humid there, I’ve built a very homemade studio in my bedroom for sound, which is the attic of my parents' house. It is dry has a good acoustic, and no weird resonances, just some outdoor noises sometimes, but not annoying at all. I recently moved for a while into my family’s place in the mountains over Lake Como. Here I’ve got all the tranquillity and peacefulness to get into a disciplined workflow.
I listen to music. Not every day though. There are days in which ‘silence’ or surrounding ‘sounds of life’ are my basis for a quiet moment of reflection.
I can work both silently or with music, depending on what I have to do. Sometimes while painting, music gives a good rhythm. While reading or writing, I prefer a quiet ambiance. I deliberately wrote ‘silence’ with quotation marks because, as John Cage in one of his writings said, as long as there is life, sounds will be there. Silence somehow embraces all the non-voluntary sounds out there. Our stomach, our blood circulating, our movements inside the space.
In terms of music, I have been growing up with a mother who was listening to a lot of classical music and Bossa Nova. She lived in Brazil for about five years of her life while being a textile designer over there and she fell totally in love with artists such as Caetano Veloso, Astrud Gilberto, Vinícius de Moraes, Elis Regina, who I particularly love, and so many others.
My first introduction to music was when I was very very little and I would dance repeatedly, almost every day, in the kitchen, a tiny kitchen. I would dance there, on Čajkovskij Swan Lake. That was my main soundtrack as a child. It has been a long time since I haven’t listened to it, but it still makes me very emotional, perhaps too emotional. I even had an illustrated book for children of this classical piece.
So many things about music... I feel like we could keep conversing and exchanging for days.
Music has been my teacher for ear training, especially when it comes to foreign languages. Thanks to music, I developed quite an intuitive ear for foreign language pronunciation — which helped me learn them kind of quickly. Anyway, I am also passionate about foreign languages. In high school, I studied language; English, German, and Spanish (and Latin) with a specialisation in English-Italian-English translation and interpretation.
Q: I know this is a cheesy question, but where do you find inspiration?
A: My inspiration is multidirectional. It unpredictably goes to things, it comes back by bringing other things. If I make visual work, I mainly take inspiration from the place I am at in that moment, and sometimes, many times, I do take inspiration from artists before me and from my digital era. Modern art, Avant-garde, Renaissance Art, ancient Asian Art (might it be Japanese, Korean, or Chinese). I also have a great appreciation for contemporary art, but sometimes I struggle to find deeper meanings other than aesthetic values. I am always in search of objects, which, for example, could be symbols from a foreign culture.
I think there is no new art or original art. Our most valuable artistic times have already pronounced their word. I think in our postmodern times, it is all a matter of remixing what we already have seen or listened to. It is finally, perhaps, what I try to do, as well. Sometimes I just produce work with the idea of re-elaborating something I have seen. To give it my visual interpretation. May it be a plant, a window, or a body.
Of course, the visual part starts with an aesthetic choice of using a specific medium, perhaps paper, oil pastel, watercolour, gouache, oil paint, etc. But then, inside, there might exist hidden meanings or stories and this is what I like. And sometimes, there is no message, no necessary story. That’s why I am creating more and more sound-based work because music itself is the most abstract of the arts. Sound is the most primitive impulse. I am not obliged to imbue sound with semantics.
A strong imagination is a commonality in both visual and sound arts in my practice. I always daydream. This forced enclosure is giving us time to reflect upon things. Of course, economically, productively speaking in a mere materialistic vision, this is not the best moment of life for anybody, but it is perhaps a moment to go slower, to reflect more on things, and to give oneself a more natural rhythm of living. We go too fast, everything goes too fast in our society. Time to stop for a while and rethink our priorities.
And by the way, I am taking the time to read about Japanese Studies. I am researching Shinto(ism). It's a different possibility for me to conceive the divine. I am born in a Christian country, in a (non-practicing) Catholic environment. But what I still find hard to accept is that, for monotheistic religions, we do have to confer on the upper, elevated, celestial power to one as the only essence. I would rather think we can worship creations of nature, inanimate objects, and ancestors who are not conserved in physical cemeteries, but rather consider them being among us as invisible Anyway. So many things I’d like to tell you.
Q: I’m pleased to already see lots of notebooks on your Instagram. How do they fit into your practice?
A: Notebooks recently have become a part of my research on both abstract art; therefore, research on colour and figurative; therefore, research on composition.
Q: You grew up in Lake Como, studied in Amsterdam and Mulhouse, and did residencies in London and I'm sure in other places. (I'm not quite sure where you're currently based) How did all these cities feed you?
A: I am currently located in my homeland, Italy. A place in a country that I would like to discover more. Sometimes I realise how long I have been living abroad, here and there, a little moment here, a longer moment there. And then? Never visited cities such as Naples and its surroundings, or Sicily where my paternal grandfather came from. I really would like to take the time, pandemic-carefulness-wise, to visit this country and learn more about it. Sometimes I feel like I am a mixture of languages and cultures, I feel spread out. Now I am taking a moment the re-centre my origins.
These different places I have lived, Spain, the UK, France, and the Netherlands, have contributed to my growing process as a human and to the evolutionary process artistically, as well, as giving me more consciousness of who I am, and what I want to do. This time of the pandemic is a moment of deep reflection on many levels.
Amsterdam has shown me, for example, the constant aerial view people are confronted by. People do mainly ride a bike all around the city and the whole country of the Netherlands is built on this biking system. The interaction that happens between people is very aerial. Thoughts, I think, go as fast as your bike — and people ride pretty fast there! It’s an active place for producing thought and body activity with a certain velocity. If you have been there and biked, you might understand what I am talking about.
A bike in the Netherlands, as I guess it might be in Denmark, becomes almost an extension of the body; an extra-body. And therefore, I think, over there people are incredibly multitasking. Differently, when driving a car, you are put in a system that already is a machine, an ugly polluting moving machine, and, well, your body is transported with a mechanism of inertia. You push a pedal and it brings you wherever you want, hence there is less synchronicity between thoughts and the act of directing the machine. Driving requires major attention — saying we need to annulate somehow that flux of meditative thoughts that we could have on a bike. Anyway, yes, living in different places has given me so much. Thinking in a specific linguistic system is quite a thing. Territory and its conformation also help identify how the mentality of people could be, I guess.
France has taught me so much in terms of self-cultivation, reading, and appreciating dolce far niente, as well as some more informal ways of conceiving food. South of France especially, which I once again chose years ago for its slow rhythm of life, is something we absolutely don’t have in cities of Northern Italy.
Q: What projects are you currently working on? What should we expect to see from you in the future?
A: I am currently researching and studying a lot because I would like to end my studies once and for all (yuhuu) with a specialisation in electronic music. It's a crazy lot of work, but I’ll work really hard to achieve it. I see myself more easily canalised through music, perhaps. Differently, in the visual arts, you either find galleries to collaborate with, or you have to struggle day by day to expose yourself to others. Music allows me to be more flexible in terms of professional resolution, as well. I really want to bring it further.
Q: Can you tell me a bit about your notebook for the Creative Minds Project?
A: For the Creative Minds Project, I thought I would envision a sort of diary of my daily life in London. I had already been in London the year before but did not expose myself to its daily routine. At least not the daily 1-hour metro ride, long distances, many many people, loads of things and events happening all over the city, and so many inputs.
I decided then to mix things I’ve seen with the things I would like to visit in the city, like the Freud Museum near Hampstead, for example. Therefore, if I remember correctly, I have made a drawing out of a portrait of Sigmund Freud. This is just an example. I also mixed things I would imaginatively like to draw with the things I was working on at the textile design studio around Brick Lane. I mixed more imaginative content with the things being photographed into drawings. Both abstract and figurative. All within a very spontaneous/instinctive approach.
