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Andrea Celeste La Forgia

schilderen , performance , Community , Autobiografisch , Artistiek onderzoek , Archieven

Andrea Celeste La Forgia is an artist based in Rotterdam. Working across archival research, painting, prop-making, and theatrical performance, her practice interweaves family experience with histories of class struggle to explore the intersections of class, labor, and art-making. Mobilizing theater, collaboration, and pedagogical encounters, her practice foregrounds how social class is lived, embodied, and reproduced through contemporary labor. Central to her work is an ongoing collaboration with her mother, a lifelong factory worker in Italy, through which lived working-class knowledge, tools and imagination become methods, critical frameworks and sites of creative agency. She holds a BA from Camberwell College of Arts, London, and an MA from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. Her work has been shown at A Tale of a Tub, Rib and MAMA (NL), Toplocentrala (BG), Hopscotch Reading Room (GE), Kirchgasse (CH), the Walker Art Gallery (UK), The British School at Rome, and MAXXI (IT). She's currently a TOOLSHED resident at Kunstinstituut Melly.

Vrouenproblemen, 2025
Vrouenproblemen, 2025 - Performance (duration: 15 minutes), in collaboration with Gloriya Avgust. Performed by Andrea Celeste La Forgia & Gloriya Avgust. Performed for 'Spinning Jenny', at TROEF, Leiden. Based on archival research, the piece is a fictional conversation between two young girls working incessantly on the spinning wheel, alternating unsayable gossip with silent movements of the ‘weaver-speak’. Hiding aluminium casted almonds in their bras, they’d fall on the ground throughout the performance, resembling bolts or nails, hinting at the possibiliy of sabotage.
Vrouenproblemen, 2025
Vrouenproblemen, 2025 - Performance (duration: 15 minutes), in collaboration with Gloriya Avgust. Performed by Andrea Celeste La Forgia & Gloriya Avgust. Performed for 'Spinning Jenny', at TROEF, Leiden. Based on archival research, the piece is a fictional conversation between two young girls working incessantly on the spinning wheel, alternating unsayable gossip with silent movements of the ‘weaver-speak’. Hiding aluminium casted almonds in their bras, they’d fall on the ground throughout the performance, resembling bolts or nails, hinting at the possibiliy of sabotage.
'Spinning Jenny', 2025
'Spinning Jenny', 2025 - Alluminium almonds (performance props). 'Spinning Jenny' curated by Emma Van Noort, TROEF, Leiden.
'Spinning Jenny', 2025
'Spinning Jenny', 2025 - ‘Spinning Jenny’ is a group show by Gloriya Avgust, Andrea Celeste La Forgia & Hara Athanasopoulou. Curated by Emma Van Noort, exploring female labour in the textile industry in Leiden. The exhibition ‘Spinning Jenny’, named after the spinning mule machine, brings together artworks questioning womanhood and their instruments of rebellion.
Portrait of my grandfather as a ceramic chandelier, 2025
Portrait of my grandfather as a ceramic chandelier, 2025 - oil and mixed media on line, 90 x 90 cm. After 25 years of factory work, my grandfather was gifted a ceramic chandelier by the factory management. It now hangs in my grandmother's tiny rental apartment. The embodiment of his lifetime commitment to the factory, and ultimately a cluster of surplus labour, promises, fantasies of return. The white and the blue of the chandelier resembles the colours of Delft blue, providing a parallel with the history of the ceramic industry in the Netherlands.
L'Unità Festival (Livorno, 1970), 2025
L'Unità Festival (Livorno, 1970), 2025 - oil on linen, 90 x 120 cm
A Carousel of Jobs (after Walter Benjamin), 2024
A Carousel of Jobs (after Walter Benjamin), 2024 - oil on linen, 90 x 90 cm. A painting of a family photograph of a carousel in the South of Italy where my mother grew up. In 1930 Walter Benjamin began a radio broadcast called "A Carousel of Jobs", which from the perspective of a child who just finished school, compares the capitalist job market to a carousel running at full speed. What matters, is not just finding one's proper place in the workforce, but preparing oneself "to fit quickly into a new occupation”, which condemned my mother to a lifetime of factory work.
I cittadini nelle trofie (Citizens in the trofie), 2024
I cittadini nelle trofie (Citizens in the trofie), 2024 - oil and mixed media on wood, 40 x 46 cm. Looking at an old Italian Communist Party (PCI) poster campaign in 1968, titled “I cittadini in frigorifero” (“citizens in the fridge”), it included a pop art style assemblage of heads. It reminded me of my mother, her working conditions and her long factory shifts in the refrigerator. This painting combines the trofie machinery from my mother’s factory with heads from the PCI campaign nailed on, a juxtaposition between past(a) and present.
'Vrouwenproblemen: Spinning the Mechanisms of Troublemaking', 2024
'Vrouwenproblemen: Spinning the Mechanisms of Troublemaking', 2024 - 'Women's Problems: Spinning the Mechanisms of Troublemaking' is a performance by Andrea Celeste la Forgia and Gloriya Avgust. Blending fiction and archival material, Women's Problems: spinning the mechanisms of troublemaking is a polyphonic choral piece conceived by Andrea Celeste La Forgia & Gloriya Avgust that brings into focus the idiosyncrasies of supposedly class-related female 'troublemaking'. In Women's Problems, she is found everywhere: in the prison, the factory, the workshop, the brothel, the housing estate, the roof, the kitchen, the bedroom, the street. She incarnates everyone: the mother, the worker, the nurse, the unemployed, the witch, the prisoner, the artist, the “we”, the “I”. Guess what? They all turned out to be exactly the same person. In Women's Problems, she lingers with the trouble, moving across non-linear historical accounts as a strategic act of constant disposition and repositioning. Women's problems: spinning the mechanisms of troublemaking was performed by Sarah Atzori, Julia Dahee Hong, Gloriya Avgust and Andrea Celeste La Forgia. The event was produced by Reading Room Rotterdam and hosted at A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam in June 2024. Camera: Gabi Dao Audio: Lou Lou Sainsbury Editing: María José Crespo
Vrouwenproblemen: spinning the mechanisms of troublemaking, 2024 - Performance (duration: 35 minutes), in collaboration with Gloriya Avgust, A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam, NL. Performed by Andrea Celeste La Forgia, Gloriya Avgust, Sarah Aztori and Julia Dahee Hong
Vrouenproblemen: spinning the mechanisms of troublemaking, 2024 - Performance (duration: 35 minutes), in collaboration with Gloriya Avgust, A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam, NL. Performed by Andrea Celeste La Forgia, Gloriya Avgust, Sarah Aztori and Julia Dahee Hong
The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily (in collaboration with Max Fletcher), 2024
The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily (in collaboration with Max Fletcher), 2024 - Performance event in occasion of Rib Summer Residency. We organised this performance event during our Summer Residency in 2024. The event took Dino Buzzati’s children’s book, ‘The Bears Famous Invasion of Sicily’ (1945), notable for the way it interweaves word and image in a non-didactic way, as a starting point. Embracing the non-didactic form of Buzzati’s text, we invited local artists to consider language as something that disrupts rather than enforces the status quo. Performances by Andrea Celeste La Forgia and Max Fletcher (with Kate Price and Tomasz Niewinski), Linus Bonduelle, Valerio Conti, Maria Jose Crespo, Oliver Doe, Lila Bullen-Smith, Gloriya Avgust, and Darly Benneker.
When Piuma Knocked Out Massimo, 2024
When Piuma Knocked Out Massimo (in collaboration with Max Fletcher), 2024 - Performative reading by Andrea Celeste La Forgia & Max Fletcher, with Kate Price and Tomasz Niewinski, at Rib, Rotterdam. For the occasion of the event ‘The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily’, we performed a reading of our original translation of the Italian children story ‘When Piuma Knocked Out Massimo’ by Gianni Rodari.
In the Economy of Promises (Chiusano 1980), 2023 - oil on linen, 80 x 65 cm. This series of paintings are based on photographs I took of my mother’s childhood drawings on the ruins of her family home, destroyed by the Irpinia earthquake (1980). These drawings represent a rare creative act, something that her current factory job doesn’t allow.
This art here is about other people's art, via the detour of 'work'. Or, the unpaid break dialogues. - Performance (duration: 35 minutes), concrete-cast pasta boxes, Canuti t-shirts, oil on canvas painting, almonds. Performed by Andrea Celeste La Forgia, Silvia Arenas, Niloufar Nematollahi, Sarah Aztori, Tiago Santos, Linus Bonduelle in occasion of 'This is Reality (and it was, but one chat away)', July 2022, Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam. This six-person performance was a scripted conversation between mother and daughter, with frequent interruptions from the mother's factory colleagues. A painting, based on a photo of my mother's work locker, is an active participant in the performance. The performers are seated on concrete cast pasta boxes. It focuses on themes of class, work, family and creativity.
This art here is about other people's art, via the detour of 'work'. Or, the unpaid break dialogues, - Performance (duration: 35 minutes), concrete-cast pasta boxes, Canuti t-shirts, oil on canvas painting, almonds. Performed by Andrea Celeste La Forgia, Silvia Arenas, Niloufar Nematollahi, Sarah Aztori, Tiago Santos, Linus Bonduelle in occasion of 'This is Reality (and it was, but one chat away)', July 2022, Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam. This six-person performance was a scripted conversation between mother and daughter, with frequent interruptions from the mother's factory colleagues. A painting, based on a photo of my mother's work locker, is an active participant in the performance. The performers are seated on concrete cast pasta boxes. It focuses on themes of class, work, family and creativity.
Portrait of my mother as a bag of pasta (tortellini), 2022 - oil on canvas, 152 x 112 cm. Everyday from the factory where she works, my mother sends me photos and voice notes. These paintings are based on photos she sent to me of the pasta-processing machinery in action. These seek to capture the class-based affect embodied in contemporary labour.
Portrait of my mother as a bag of pasta, 2022 - installation view. UBIK, Rotterdam, NL
Colonie (Rimini 1937), 2021 - oil on canvas, 200 x 152 cm. A painting based on a postcard featuring various ‘colonie’ buildings. The colonie were fascist-era seaside camps for working-class families, designed to give children from the cities a break while teaching them fascist values. Nowadays most of them lie empty and abandoned on many Italian seafronts.
Weaver-speak, 2021
Weaver-speak, 2021 - screenprint on paper, 59 x 84 cm
There are no painters, but only people who engage with painting among other activities, 2021 - Performance (duration: 15 minutes), MAXXI (Rome, IT), oil on canvas paintings (dimensions variable), almonds, rocks. Performed by Andrea Celeste La Forgia
Postcard to Gramsci, 2020 - oil on canvas, 180 x 140 cm, in collaboration with Max Fletcher. JOHN MOORES PAINTING PRICE 2020, May 18 - 27 Jun 2021, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK

'The Imaginary Stage: Rehearsing through Puppets, Play, and Other Tools' (TOOLSHED Residency)

Datum:
Locatie: Kunstinstituut Melly
In samenwerking met: Kerem Akar

Our joint project focuses on the relationship between labour, social class, migration, and collective forms of learning and making. During our TOOLSHED residency, we explore how artistic and pedagogical practices can function as tools for emancipation, solidarity, and institutional imagination. Through performance, collaboration, and research, they develop situations in which labour, knowledge, and creativity are collectively rethought and activated.

https://www.kunstinstituutmelly.nl/en/exhibitions/9167-toolshed-2-the-imaginary-stage

Slippages of the mouth

Datum:
Locatie: BUNA Forum for Contemporary Visual Art
In samenwerking met: Gloriya Avgust

Live performance in collaboration with Gloriya Avgust.

Vrouwenproblemen: spinning the mechanisms of troublemaking

Datum:
Locatie: ToploCentrala
In samenwerking met: Gloriya Avgust

Live performance in collaboration with Gloriya Avgust

The Adventures of Cipollino

Datum:
Locatie: Index Poetry
In samenwerking met: Max Fletcher

Performative reading in collaboration with Max Fletcher for LUDD GANG Issue 23 Launch

Spinning Jenny

Datum:
Locatie: TROEF

Group exhibition by Gloriya Avgust, Andrea Celeste La Forgia & Hara Athanasopoulou, curated by Emma Van Noort. ‘Spinning Jenny’ is a group show exploring female labour in the textile industry.

https://troefleiden.nl/spinning-jenny-24-01-2025-to-16-03-2025

Vrouwenproblemen

Datum:
Locatie: TROEF
In samenwerking met: Gloriya Avgust

Performance (duration: 15 minutes). Performed by Andrea Celeste La Forgia & Gloriya Avgust in occasion of the exhibition 'Spinning Jenny' at TROEF, Leiden.

Experimental Children’s Drawing Workshop (in collaboration with Max Fletcher)

Datum:
Locatie: Rib
In samenwerking met: Max Fletcher

An experimental children’s drawing workshop in two parts hosted by us at Rib, focused on the juxtaposition of image and text. To conclude, we hosted an exhibition of works made by local children of Charlois in our workshops.

When Piuma Knocked Out Massimo

Datum:
Locatie: Rib
In samenwerking met: Max Flecther

Performative reading by Andrea Celeste La Forgia & Max Fletcher with Kate Price and Tomasz Niewinski

The adventures of Caterina (Rib Summer Residency)

Datum:
Locatie: Rib
In samenwerking met: Max Fletcher
https://www.ribrib.nl/summer-lab/summer-residents-2024

Vrouwenproblemen: spinning the mechanisms of troublemaking

Datum:
Locatie: A Tale of a Tub
In samenwerking met: Gloriya Avgust
https://www.a-tub.org/en/events/vrouwenproblemen

Another finger-finger-off

Datum:
Locatie: NDSM Treehouse
In samenwerking met: Gloriya Avgust

Rot

Datum:
Locatie: Kirchgasse Galerie
In samenwerking met: Max Fletcher
https://www.kirchgasse.com/rot/

The Independent

Datum:
Locatie: MAXXI
In samenwerking met: Max Fletcher

Another finger-finger-off (radio play)

Datum:
Locatie: Silverfish Radio (Worm Radio)
In samenwerking met: Gloriya Avgust

Didactic Poetry

Datum:
Locatie: Kirchgasse Galerie
In samenwerking met: Max Fletcher
https://www.kirchgasse.com/didactic-poetry/

Investigating Memory Collectively

Datum:
Locatie: Goethe Institute Rotterdam
In samenwerking met: (performance as part of Philipp Schwalb residency)

Portrait of my mother as a bag of tortellini

Datum:
Locatie: Hopscotch Reading Room

This art here is about other people’s art, via the detour of ‘work’. Or, the unpaid break dialogues

Datum:
Locatie: Showroom MAMA

This is Reality (And it was but one chat away)

Datum:
Locatie: Showroom MAMA, UBIK & Slash Gallery

I Must Be Living Twice

Datum:
Locatie: Palazzo Massimo, Venice Biennale
In samenwerking met: Curated by Shimmer

The Ballad of the Hunchbacked

Datum:
Locatie: Worm Radio

Props for profit or props for anarchy, Piet Zwart Project Space, Rotterdam, NL

Datum:
Locatie: Piet Zwart Project Space

Work songs from the Tillburg archive

Datum:
Locatie: Worm Radio

John Moores Painting Prize

Datum:
Locatie: Walker Art Gallery
In samenwerking met: Max Fletcher

King Buzz The Wristband, or how to split a lazy group scratching

Datum:
Locatie: Piet Zwart Project Space

There are no painters, but only people who engage in painting among other activities

Datum:
Locatie: MAXXI
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