Italian artist Ileana explores space and identity through skateboarding

Ileana was born and raised in the small Italian town of Rimini, but since studying at the Academy of Fine Arts she has relocated to Venice (the Italian one) to further her research, which is centered around her relationship to space and heavily influenced and guided by her experiences as a skateboarder.

We spoke to Ileana about her recent artwork, Quando Mi Vidi Non C’ero, how skateboarding informs her artistic practice, how we can rediscover ourselves through the space around us, why skateboarders make great artists, and more.

Your work explores ways to modify, renew, and interfere with space. In what way do you think skateboarding is able to do this, and how is it different from the impact that other physical expressions have on space?

Skateboarding allows us to project our personality onto physical, public space. We live in a society in which space arises according to well-defined, rigid and structured patterns, where our movements are constrained and limited.

Through a simple tool such as a wooden board and four wheels, our body can expand and project itself elsewhere. Space temporarily changes its function and in this sense is transformed; at the same time skateboarders are able to enter this evolutionary flow, both of a physical and mental nature.

When did you first incorporate your love of skateboarding into your artwork? In your work Quando Mi Vidi Non C’ero, skateboarding was literally a part of creating the artwork, but do you feel like it has a conceptual role in your other work, particularly with how you think about space and identity?

These reflections came about during the quarantine period due to the pandemic, a time stream in which I felt rather static and stuck. To counteract this kind of condition, I began to think about how I could overcome it, and from there I began to think and rethink how much the culture of skateboarding was a key to me in all of this.

In Quando Mi Vidi Non C’ero, skateboarding becomes an integral part of the artistic process as it is the metaphorical medium of change.

In the other works, however, this kind of theme persists, but it becomes a wider reflection on space. I feel that there is only space around me: my body, the room I am in, the blank page and the marks I am creating there. We live and move in space, we create space, we are space.

I’m not interested in the idea of a space considered in its wholeness, but my attention is focused on the most disparate “pieces of space.” Since the initial big bang, spaces have multiplied, fragmented, diversified. There are spaces of all sizes and kinds, for every use and function. Conceptually everything is space: the body, the mind, places, objects, words, images; spaces that are not understood by me as mere containers whose existence is taken for granted, but as bodies capable of moving, feeling and experiencing emotions in turn.

You created a photo book from your work Quando Mi Vidi Non C’ero, but with so much of your work’s emphasis on physicality and movement, can the visual outcome be separated from its creation? Is the photo book a documentation of the physical work or is it the artwork itself? And in the same vein, I wonder, do you consider yourself more of a performance artist or a visual artist?

The photobook is one of the many possible outputs I have chosen in order to share my project with the public. The main work, is the physical canvases and the photographic work documenting the process. However, the photobook can itself be considered a small, portable work of art that you can take with you wherever you wish.

I would like to say that I consider myself a visual artist, because I don’t favor one medium over another. In my work process I think of a project and then imagine the best way and medium through which I can express it. In all of this the performance aspect certainly plays a central role within my research.

The title Quando Mi Vidi Non C’ero translates to “When I Saw Myself I Was Not There”. Can you explain what inspired this name and how it reflects the work?

It’s a title that has to do with the concept of transformation and change. Very often I observe myself as a person… who I am, how I react to situations, my thoughts, my emotions.

But if I observe myself again in a different, later temporality, I notice how all this is transformed. As a form within the universe I am constantly absorbing the external stimuli around me. We are what we eat, what we read, the people we associate with, and all of this becomes a continuous stimulus that leads me to enter into this process of evolution, to question my beliefs all the time. That is precisely why when I saw myself, I was not present at the end. My present self has already changed into something else.

In Quando Mi Vidi Non C’ero you start with a blank canvas and use your skateboard almost as a paintbrush to change the space around you. In your artist statement you say that “the skateboard becomes the medium, body prosthesis, which allows me to … go elsewhere. The body thus becomes an expressive space, the origin of all other spaces.” When skateboarders are in the streets, they don’t necessarily change the world around them but interpret it in a different way, so I’m wondering, do you think skateboarders impress upon the urban landscape, or does the urban landscape impress upon the skateboarder?

I think it is a union of both aspects. What fascinates me is the process of creating an interference; an instability capable of emptying the space of its initial identity in favor of subverted and alternative realities, new levels and architectures of thought. Precisely in this way that kind of space subject to control can be renewed through an individual act of expression and a transformative process enacted by a language of possibility.

This leads to the creation of a new dimension, a new architectural complex that is intimate, personal, internal and a field of mutual growth: an encounter takes place between two bodies that need each other to grow and renew themselves. Space, on the one hand, becomes a fluid river, in whose bed flow infinite possible meanings, in a dialectical play between persistence and change, durability and renewal; on the other hand, the modification of the external space becomes a metaphor for the modification of the self, in order to get in touch with different and multiple states of being. All at a metaphorical conceptual level of thought, I mean.

Space becomes a source of identity: through space we can rediscover ourselves. Every encounter leaves me something, changes me.

What was the inspiration and process behind the Skateboarding Spots series? You talk about space as being “a source of identity” through which we can rediscover ourselves. In the context of skateboarding, do you think the DIY spots, skate parks, and car parks where we skate impact our sense of identity?

Absolutely, I think all the elements you mentioned affect so much in this case. I recently moved to Venice, a lagoon island where the architecture is unique and different from all other cities, especially from my hometown, Rimini. Walking for a long time around Venice, I noticed that in spite of everything my eye kept seeing and looking for certain shapes belonging to urban elements that characterize precisely those spaces that we skaters can reinterpret: stairs, handrails, benches, portions of concrete appear as reminiscences in my personal imagination. They constantly tangle inside me, they are in constant movement. I can recognize them everywhere where the passerby would not notice any detail. They are shy shapes that do not immediately jump out at the eye, but seem to exist specifically for skaters.

The Skateboarding Spots project invites us to look at even the smallest and most marginal forms of space around us from a different perspective; thus emerges the falling away of certainties with respect to what we perhaps take most for granted, such as our living within space. Also I’m working on a new series called, Acknowledgment, which has to do with these forms that always recur in my imagination, in an almost obsessive way.

You mentioned that you “have always been convinced that skateboarders have an edge and a greater sensitivity to be able to reinterpret the world, to be able to be artists.” Why do you think this is?

Yes, I firmly believe that. We have an alert and careful sensibility to reinterpret the space around us, each with a unique and personal attitude.

The process of reinterpretation is inherent to the transfiguration of matter and reality, and this has to do fully with the artistic process. This I think leads to a more trained, open and creative mind.

How long will you be in Venice and what will be the outcome of your research there?

I don’t know exactly how long I will stay here in Venice. Definitely moving to other cities and being open to what the place has to offer, always leads to growth on multiple levels.

The important thing is to take the best from each situation. Venice in this case also led me to experiment through other art forms that I had never experienced firsthand, such as painting, which this island is steeped in. And it’s Venice that opened me up to making the latest cycle of Skateboarding Spots. I still remain curious and open to every possible stimulus that this place will have to give me.

Follow Ileana on Instagram to see more of her art. 

Interview: Sarah Huston
Photos: Ileana