Anna Franceschini
Working with things allows me to reflect on our power relations: we use, we consume, we replace
«Staging the rituals of the economic system we live in, exaggerating them or simply showing them, is already a way to criticize them»
There’s a moment in Anna Franceschini’s work when matter itself seems to hold its breath. Objects tremble, machines whisper, industrial devices become creatures poised between gesture and autonomy. It’s there—at that threshold—that cinema, stripped of film, reanimates as a physical experience: a “film without film,” made of motors, wires, and visual rituals. Born in 1979, Franceschini doesn’t film things—she resurrects them, interrogates them, and stages them as if they finally had something to say. Her work begins with cinema but slips elsewhere: into the archaeology of objects, into their capacity to embody desire, obsession, and the aesthetics of capitalism. Her installations, poised between sculpture, performance, and apparatus, collapse the distance between the human and the non-human, between art and industry. Machines become bodies, commodities turn into sentient organisms, industrial remnants acquire scenic consciousness. It’s a poetics of short-circuiting, where the “machine as cinema” replaces the old dream of “cinema as machine.” With Venere & Marte, on view through November 16 at the Antiquarium of the Sanctuary of Hercules Victor (VILLÆ, Tivoli), Franceschini builds a dialogue between archaeology and technology, the sacred and the industrial. Twelve analog photographs, shot with the monumental Polaroid 20×24, capture a stage set animated by the energy of a Tesla coil: electricity becomes choreography, the archaeological site transforms into a theater of invisible forces. It’s a tribute to fire and love—as in the allegories by Brueghel and Rubens that inspired the title—but also a reflection on our contemporary faith in energy and production. At Kunstverein Gartenhaus in Vienna, where her exhibition Nights Out runs until November 15, three dancing machines shake human wigs in an almost cabalistic darkness—sensual, pathetic, spectral. Franceschini constructs bodies that don’t exist but persist; presences moving to an alien rhythm, as if matter itself were claiming its right to the stage.
Her aesthetic is posthuman, yet with a distinctly baroque grace: a cinema made of trembling objects, breathing images, and lights that flicker like synapses. In a world where everything is already spectacle, Anna Franceschini reminds us that even the silence of a machine can be a form of storytelling—and perhaps the truest one of all.
The exhibition Venere & Marte in Tivoli was conceived as a tribute to the Sanctuary of Hercules Victor. How did you work to make the site’s archaeology dialogue with your artistic vision?
It was love at first sight. Electricity — in every sense — was the key. The Sanctuary isn’t only a masterpiece of Roman devotional architecture: over the centuries it became a foundry, a paper mill, and finally the first power plant to bring electric light to Rome. All of this was made possible by the water jumps that also powered the fountains and pools of nearby Villa d’Este. Many visitors stop at the Villa’s gardens, which are breathtaking, but the Sanctuary’s industrial history — its “electric” memory — absolutely thrilled me. It immediately made me think that the photographic project proposed by director Andrea Bruciati should be both analog and animated. For the analog part, I had an exceptional partner: the Polaroid Foundation, which through its 20×24 Project allowed me to use the world’s largest instant camera, the Polaroid 20×24. Shooting with that “beast” — accompanied by John Reuters, one of the few cinematographers in the world capable of operating it — was an almost mystical experience.
Your photographs intertwine technology, history, and imagination. What struck you most about this site, and how did you choose to translate it through light and movement?
The Sanctuary inspired Piranesi’s “infernos” and Rubens and Brueghel the Elder’s Mars Disarmed by Venus. In that painting, set precisely within the tabernae of the Sanctuary, technical instruments — compasses, tongs, drills, pots — are scattered all around the lovers. It’s Vulcan’s workshop, where the god keeps forging even after the war is over. That sea of tools deeply moved me: I began collecting metal chimney brushes, transforming them into bracelets for mannequin hands; I galvanized pole-dancer heels and paired them with Rubens-like cherubs recovered from major art thefts; I assembled prosthetic limbs with clamps and threaded rods. But something was missing — animation. I wanted real electricity. So I brought in a Tesla coil, that spectacular little machine producing blue lightning, and let it impress the film.
In Nights Out, currently on view in Vienna, you present “dancing machines” that seem to have a life of their own. Where did this idea come from, and what relationship do you see between the human and the mechanical body?
It all started a long time ago. My graduation film at film school, almost twenty years ago, was a short observational documentary about a mannequin factory. No interviews — just gestures and production. Since then, I’ve never stopped animating things. Nights Out, curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini and Ilaria Gianni, is the natural continuation of that reflection: three mechanical pole dancers moving tirelessly in an infinite loop. They’re “approachable machines,” but the real question is — does the viewer truly want to approach them? Whose desire is it, and toward what is it directed? The performance goes on until the dancers reach structural exhaustion: an endless choreography, the dream of every performer… and perhaps of every machine, too.
The exhibition seems to offer an ironic yet profound reflection on our relationship with work and performance. Is it a critique of capitalism or a staging of its rituals?
I’d say both. To stage the rituals of the economic system we live in — to exaggerate them, or even just to present them — is already a form of critique. I think of Chaplin’s Modern Times or Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. The grotesque is one of my preferred registers: a synthetic, almost sterile grotesque made of few materials and obsessive movements. I’m fascinated by that point where repetition becomes exhausting — for the machine and for the viewer — and produces fascination, discomfort, and a faint smile all at once.
You began as a filmmaker. What led you to expand your language toward sculpture and performance?
At a certain point, my films became denser, almost motionless. They had turned into sculptures performing for the camera. Eventually, I decided to free them — to let those objects act in real space, without the mediation of the screen.
In your work, the idea of the “animated object” often recurs. Is it a form of empathy toward things, or a way of observing human beings from another perspective?
Both. Industrial objects evoke a kind of pity in me. They’re produced in the millions, often without grace, made to be used and discarded. We only notice them when they break — and then our attention is angry. Working with things allows me to reflect on our power dynamics: we use, consume, replace. Objects resemble us more than we like to admit.
Is there an object or a space you would call your visual obsession?
Display stands. I’m fascinated by those “supporting” objects that hold up others — bases, hangers, brackets. They’re the invisible architecture of desire. And then there are wigs: once placed inside a mechanical device, they become a bridge between the human and the technological, hybrid bodies never fully complete — and precisely for that reason, poetic.
You move between cinema, visual art, and theoretical research. How do you manage to keep a balance between these worlds?
With difficulty — but I couldn’t live without it. Study gives me structure; cinema trains my gaze; art brings me back to matter. Sometimes I escape into a half-empty movie theater — last summer in Milan, on a gray afternoon, I watched Soderbergh’s Presence completely alone. It’s a rare luxury that keeps me alive.
You’ve travelled and worked a lot. Is there one place that has influenced your way of seeing more than others?
Probably my hometown, Vigevano. A place suspended between countryside and shoe factories, between rice fields and industry. My grandfather designed shoes, my father designed machinery. I think my gaze comes from there — from that coexistence of artisanal grace and mechanical precision.
If you had to describe your relationship with art in three words?
Dead, fashionable, modern.
And to end with a super classic: what are your plans for 2026?
A monograph with Lenz Press, a solo show in Paris and, of course, new machines — slightly different ones. Maybe even a film…
Interview: Germano D’Acquisto
Portraits: Ludovica Arcero
Installation Views Vienna: Kunstdocumentationcom. Courtesy of Kunstverein Gartenhaus
Installation Views Tivoli: Emanuela Fortuna \ Lucky’s Production. Courtesy of Villa D’Este
Total Look: Magliano
