Cléo Totti - Borderland Residencies

Cléo Totti

Place of Residency
Art au Centre x Les Chiroux

Cléo Totti is a multidisciplinary artist working and living in Liège. She makes sculptures, photographs, paintings, sound pieces, installations and performances with a wide range of materials, including wax, clay, plastic, resin, plaster, aluminum, copper, textiles and organic elements. Her main motif is the human body, which is fragmented, distorted and transformed into pictorial objects. Alternating between fluid and solid, her work signals a fluidity and hybridity of both synthetic and natural bodies.

Artistic Method

Discipline

performance, sculpture, installations

In a context where everything is merchandise (the body, emotions, illnesses, art...) where industry and the digital tends to make us obsolete and dissolve our humanity, the body is my starting point, it is both my support and the studied object of my work. I seek to represent various sensations related to human existence that I envision in an inclusive whole, borrowing from various cultures to report multiplicities. I find my inspiration as much in Greek mythology as in colonized cultures by reinterpreting it to create fictions and meta-connections.

I represented male and female figures in order to offer a point of view. Women having often been represented by men, as an "Empowerment" I want to seize the male representation in my turn.My work also questions identity in the broad sense (gay-trans-bi-queer). Through myth I want to address history of femininity and its representations: Women who often appear monstrous because of their desire to emancipation or because they disturb by their choices or their convictions. I focused on several figures such as those of Penthesilea(the fight), Aphrodite (love and beauty) and Medusa (petrification, the witch) that I hybridize in certain sculptures or paintings. I also try to reinterpret the canons of beauty conveyed by classical sculpture by deforming the bodies with which I work. I started by molding breasts, I then used them in one of my sculptures / assemblages. Offerings to Aphrodite that I presented in Athens in 2016, during the temporary closure of the banks.

Project during the Borderland Residency

Year of participation

2024

For this residency, I would like to focus on collecting images from my archives and reflect on an artist book. I would like also to continue a previous research on the concept of Phantoms, the continuation of some works that I will show for my next solo show at Les Brasseurs center for contemporary Art in Liège in 2024.

Website
cleototti.com