In works by the Berlin-based artist Beatrice Marchi, characters migrate freely across canvases, projections, and performative actions. Marchi is currently developing a project influenced by a decades-old crime that shook the area north of Milan during her teenage years, a case that left a deep impression on Italian collective memory. The images we glimpse here offer an oblique vision of this work in progress, capturing moments from the creative process as Marchi continues to examine the delicate tensions between social inclusion and exclusion, weaving together narratives of betrayal, aspiration, glamour, and personal defeat.

Beatrice Marchi (born in Gallarate, Italy, 1986) lives and works in Berlin. She studied with Alberto Garutti at the Accademia di Brera in Milan and with Jutta Koether at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, receiving an MFA in 2017. Using various media such as video, performance, and painting, Beatrice Marchi works using the perspective of the clown to narrate moments of personal experience intertwined with collective dynamics such as the desire for belonging and power structures. In 2024, she was awarded the ArteVisione prize, which supports artists working with moving images. Her work has been presented in both solo and group exhibitions at international institutions and galleries, including Fort Biennale 01, Festung Franzensfeste (TBA, 2024); Museion, Bozen (2023); Pogobar, KW, Berlin (2023); MAXXI L’Aquila (2022); Fondazione Prada, Milan and Tokyo (2022); Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin (2021); Istituto Svizzero, Milan (2021); MACRO, Rome (2021); Sandy Brown, Berlin (2020); Palazzo Reale, Milan (2019); Performance Space, New York (2018); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2017); 16th Rome Art Quadriennale, Rome (2016). She teaches fine arts at NABA Milan and Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg.

All images courtesy the artist.