Giuliana Califano
Giuliana Califano is an Italian artist, designer, researcher, and educator working at the intersection of ceramics, sculpture, biomaterials, and digital fabrication. Her artistic practice combines traditional craftsmanship with contemporary technologies, exploring material transformation through experimentation with sustainable and biodegradable materials. Her research investigates ceramics, biocomposites, and biomaterials, questioning how new material ecologies can reshape our understanding of art, design, permanence, and decay. She has conducted research at the Institute for Polymers, Composites and Biomaterials (IPCB-CNR) in Italy, held a research fellowship at IUAV University of Venice, and currently teaches technical and artistic drawing in Rome.
During her residency at Öres, Giuliana intends to experiment with seaweed and other organic residues found on Örö Island, combining these local materials into biodegradable sculptural objects. The project draws inspiration from the island's remarkable transformation over time: from grazing land, to a strategic military base occupied by different armed forces—including Finnish, Swedish, and Russian—and finally to its current identity as a protected nature reserve rich in flora and fauna.
Artist Statement
ENTANGLED
The body of sculptures created during the residency on the island of Oro represents a natural and artificial stratigraphy of the place. The works are made with organic residues from the island – mussels, algae, branches, bones, pinecones, granite sand – but also with human-made waste – iron handles, plastic, nails, paper and cardboard – found during the exploration.
The organic residues, crushed and recomposed into bio-composites, envelop bodies made from a collage of found objects. Once mixed, the materials lose their individual identity to become something new.
They become technofossils of an overlapping past and present: mussel shells and algae merge with branches, bones, iron handles, plastic, coffee grounds, and newspaper. Layers that are an archive – a contemporary stratigraphy that tells the history of the place, of matter deposited over years, centuries, and millennia, but also the history of today. Because our experience of the present is shaped not only by what surrounds us now, but also by all the layers that came before us. Even our cellular memory, or the star-stuff of which our bodies are composed, reminds us of these stratifications.
But these sculptures do not only look to the past. They look like technofossils from a future in which human waste and nature are by now indistinguishable, compacted into hybrid geological layers. They are fossils of a present that is already becoming past, and at the same time, prophets of a future in which the human and the non-human are intertwined.
The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff.
We are a way for the universe to know itself.
— Carl Sagan
THANKS
The travel of Giuliana to Örö Island was supported by ÖRES Residency and Koyne Program.
Photos by: © Giuliana Califano & Koyne Program