About
Roberta Maddalena (b. 1981, Milan, Italy) is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Berlin, Germany. Her artistic research takes the form of drawings, paintings, photography, video, performance and installation. She graduated in design and holds a master’s degree in film production. Has taught drawing practice since 2010 and has lived in Berlin since 2018, where she works across multimedia art and film.
Her work has been shown at institutions and relevant venues including the Triennale Museo del Design and Casa Testori in Milan, Carlo V Castle in Lecce, the Museo delle Arti and Museo del Fumetto in Cosenza, and in London. Her performances have also been presented at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice and the PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan.
Both her visual language and her process seek to broaden perspectives on life and to build a dialogue between reality and the ethereal domain, one that nurtures imagination and unconditional connections. Blending reality and fantasy, her work questions identity and sensibility, and leads to sensorial experiences in which transformation is both topic and journey.
Masks and nature are recurring motifs, through which the artist questions Western society and speaks about the way identity is shed, hidden and reformed. Processes of entropy, transformation and decomposition, often read as endings, instead open onto new states of being and care.
Photo by Dovile Sermokas
From 2010 she taught drawing, both privately and in workshops at various institutions, offering participants a technical tool, a language and a chance for personal change. This teaching is often accompanied by performances that involve body and signs, in which repetitive gestures trace black ink strokes, functioning like mantras. Participants are invited to connect with their inner selves and build worlds of their own, sometimes by interacting themselves with the performance.
Following her TED Talk on the social value of drawing in Italy in 2017, she moved to Berlin in 2018, and started incorporating filmmaking into her artistic practice.
Roberta Maddalena also collaborates as a cinematographer with directors and producers who use unconventional narrative approaches to give a voice to those less often heard in Western society. She commits to projects that aim to have a social impact during the production phase, such as equal pay, diverse crews and sustainable filmmaking, and favours documentaries, short fiction films and video art.
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