Valentina Vella (IT/US) is an artist, writer and performer based in Rotterdam but originally from Rome, Italy. She holds a BA + MA in English literature from Roma Tre University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Media from Columbia College Chicago. She has performed internationally, including at La Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (Rome), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), and at Kunstinstituut Melly, Varia, Paviljoen-aan-het-Water, WORM and Vrooom in Rotterdam.
I create artworks about the narrative impulse and about how emotions and behaviors—especially those tied to reproduction, work and survival—intersect with political and ecological systems. I’m interested in how feelings and the stories we tell ourselves are shaped by culture, histories, and environments. My current focus is on what it feels like to live inside structures that keep us numb or stuck, and what it might take to transition to different ways of relating. Zen principles and practices influence how I think about behavioral patterns, time, and improvisation. I’m drawn to exploring altered states of mind as a way of revealing new potentials for sensing, relating, and imagining.
My work spans writing, sound, video, and performance, and it lingers in the thresholds where personal experience becomes collective. I think of my performances as invitations to enter shared affective spaces. They are immersive, collaborative, and often improvised, using humor, rhythm, and repetition to shift perception.
I see writing as a process of attunement, and the ear is its ultimate destination. It lives in the voice, in the act of saying what is overlooked, repressed, or uncomfortable. I’m drawn to the edges of language, where it becomes rhythm, vibration; something felt in the body before the mind tries to grasp its meaning.
Water of Love - Worm Version
Water of Love
performance with the participation of Luke Deane, Mitsitron and Stephen Kerr
Reading during The Rehearsal event
A Conversation on Love
In this episode we tried to tackle a sticky topic: love! We rambled a lot, from romantic love to politics, from bad exes to spirituality and art. There will definitely be a Part Two! Some of the people we mentioned/songs we listened to: Byung-Chul Hang, John O'Donohue, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Bini Adamczak, Vacation from Love (Michelle Gurevich), Slurf Song (Michael Hurley, The Unholy Modal Rounders, and Jeffrey Frederick & The Clamtones).
Bad at Love - Phase One of "School of Love and Chaos" (old title: Bad Investments)
The project was an intimate exploration of my personal struggles with love and relationships, but it also aimed to address questions about the commodification of love and its political repercussions. It culminated in a performance at Paviljoen-aan-het-Water, with Luke Deane as co-performer and Amy Gowan as wrangler. It was largely improvised: we conceived it as an “open book/open album,” an opening up the artistic process since its early stages.
Zo doe je dat
performance and interview during an event about the Praktijk Bijdrage
Performance at Party Party - DAI Fundraiser for non-EU students
Performance of some Netherworld pieces during the DAI fundraiser
Netherworld at an other world
The first full live performance of Netherworld, an album of sonic poetry about personal and planetary crises set to electronic music. Weaving together the literary and the utterly mundane, it is brutally funny and often danceable.
performance at Vrooom
performance of sound pieces from A Ride West and Netherworld
ART IS DEAD - LONG LIVE ART notes towards a post-capitalist art practice (RADIO SHOW)
The current art system is broken. It creates artificial scarcity, exhaustion, anxiety, needless competition. How do we make good art while taking care of ourselves and each other? How do we set the old model on fire and build something new? Valentina doesn't have the answers (yet?) but she will be exploring these questions with the help of many books and friends in her (monthly) radio show. There will also be sounds/music!
LIVE: Kunstinstituut Melly and Amarte Foundation in Concert
performance of some Netherworld pieces during Museum Night in response to Lisa Tan's installation.
Rehearsing Change | Fostering a culture of radical self-care
In a complex, profoundly unequal and ecologically imperiled world, most of us don't feel at ease. In this workshop I guided participants through somatic exercises based on the Polyvagal Theory and my own embodied artistic practice that gave them a taste of what is possible when we work with and not against the needs of the body and the nervous system.
Netherworld - album launch
The launch event of the longer and revised version of my sound album Netherworld. Supported by Dream and Deed Foundation.
Netherworld
An installation comprising photos and a sound album. Netherworld is composed of spoken word recordings and sound pieces about failure, depression, involuntary nomadism and the pathologizing of perfectly normal emotional responses to the social and ecological crises we are facing. It achieves epic levels of mundanity and it will make you feel uncomfortable about the state of the world but your body will want to dance to it.
Coming Suddenly, Passing Strangely
I presented a piece from my upcoming sound album Netherworld.
Urbi et Orbi
my piece Urbi et Orbi was broadcasted during Rava Vavàra, a radio show by Eva Macali
I Pidocchi
poetry reading during the festival Women Out of Joint
Cognitive Capitalism, an Open Letter to the Invisible Committee
exhibition of texts and artworks made during the Saas-Fee 2018 Summer Institute of Art | Berlin
A Ride West (hybrid memoir)
I worked on a hybrid memoir based on A Ride West
Desire(d)
performance event during which I presented Dirge Circuit
Dark Matter
practices. In 2015 I led creative workshops during the micro-residency program Dark Matter, which I developed with Pamala Bishop and Jay Murphy in New Orleans. We embraced the principles outlined by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi in Thought in the Act (which explores the intimate, embodied connections between thinking and creative practice). I worked with thirty American artists during three days of experimentation, exhibition, play and rest.
You Are Not Your - performance by Caleb Yono
I performed in a collaborative piece by Caleb Yono
The Imaginary Center of Perception
I participated as performer and collaborator in a performance by Kirsten Leenars about police violence
Notes on Empty Chairs (1, 2, 3) - performances by Kirsten Leenaars
I participated as performer and collaborator in a performance by Kirsten Leenars during the Doris Salcedo exhibition.
A Ride West Live
A theatrical performance based on the film A Ride West written and performed by Valentina Vella; featuring a live band (Nathan Paulus, Sharon Hoyer and Josh Miller from the I Ching Quartet and Daniel Schneider from The Singleman Affair) and live video editing and processing by Michael LaHood. Sound design by Alex Drosen. Lighting by Chelsey Shilling.
A Ride West
An experimental film on love, fear, desire and the violent, masculine American myths of conquest and self-reliance. The projected started as a durational performance (riding a horse across America in the summer 2013) and culminated in a video installation presented at The Center for Book & Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago in May 2014.