Margherita Soldati is a visual artist based in Amsterdam and co-founder of Absurd Beings Collective. She graduated from Industrial Design in Italy in 2014 and from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2018. With a profound sense of care and curiosity for the intersection of art and well-being, her work centers on the transformative potential of materials and their connection to the human senses. Her multidisciplinary practice encompasses installation, sculpture, and performance, utilizing natural elements and organic textures. She often engages with society’s institutions of science, healthcare and science of the mind, to engender accessible relationships with the work of experts.
Margherita has been working with Mediamatic since 2015, and most recently as an artist in residence in 2023. In an interview with her, she discusses her residency at Mediamatic, reflecting on some of the projects she has done during her residency. We also delve into her previous projects, exploring the unique styles and themes that define her artistic expression.
Margherita invites viewers to intimately engage with their surroundings, fostering a deeper understanding of our relationship with the environment and the impact of sensory experiences. She is interested in researching topics related to her personal health, particularly in connection with food and the environment. As such, she sees the body as a platform that produces experiences, highlighting the role of tactile perception in creating a more interactive relationship between space, artwork, and visitors.
During her time at Mediamatic, she discovered it to be an exploratory space that offered her the freedom to experiment and the chance to connect with others.
''Mediamatic for artists is a playground, where you are given a lot of freedom and tools to explore and realize ideas, to experiment, and to work with audiences.''
One of her works that was showcased at Mediamatic from 2018-2022, The Skin is an Extension of the Brain, was placed on staircase handrails, ceilings and doors, reflecting her artistic focus on creating a more active use of our senses. These textile installations were the evolution from an earlier project called ‘Toccami’ in which Margherita explored how tactile surfaces can benefit elderly people with dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Through this work and many others, Margherita is interested in integrating textile and tactile surfaces into everyday spaces and objects.
Moreover, her work predominantly focuses on the relationship between the human body and our surroundings, and her artistic practice explores both the micro and macro perspectives. She often creates multi-sensory experiences through her works, using materials, shapes, and tactility to convert stories.
Her project, Uncomfortable, addresses the issue of plastic pollution by showing the discomfort and environmental impact of microplastics. Created from 100% plastic waste collected in Aruba, the project features an organic-shaped chair, with a similar pattern to the rocks on the island. While plastic is often seen as a practical and useful material, the chair is also designed to be uncomfortable to sit in. It essentially serves as a paradox between the (perceived) usefulness of plastic and the discomfort it causes, also calling attention to the environmental harm caused by plastic and waste.
Thus, at any given time, Margherita concentrates on what specifically fascinates her, maintaining a strong focus on tactility and sensory experiences in her works. Her art is also becoming more reflective of her personal experiences, and she has realized that creating art is increasingly a learning process for her.
Evolving Sensitivities
In the past 3 years, Margherita has been exploring the strong relationship between the body and its environment through the subject of food, reflecting on its significant presence in her life and the challenges it brings.
When she was 14 years old, Margherita developed a rare allergy condition, making her allergic to almost all fruits and vegetables. In general, allergies are complex immune responses that can be challenging to understand in the medical world, and with such a rare and under-researched condition, Margherita has found little explanation as to what may cause such allergies, even with extensive medical tests and research she did over the years. It is also difficult to map the composition of foods across different places. For example, an apple in Italy may have a different molecular composition than an apple in the Netherlands. This makes testing different foods to understand the possible reactions even more challenging and complex.
In trying to better understand the root causes of these allergies, Margherita has collaborated with various medical professionals. She has met Laura Bolte, doctor, dietitian, gut microbiome scientist, and MD/PhD candidate at UMCG Department of Gastroenterology from Groningen, and worked with Justin Steward, an evolutionary ecologist. While she worked with many experts, who are specialized in their specific medical area, it is difficult to connect different domains such as allergology, immunology, evolution, and chemistry to find an explanation for such a condition, because of the research complexity and the lack of information on the subject which is currently still studied.
In 2023, during her residency at Mediamatic, which involved a bio art coalition with Mediamatic, Waag and Toby Kiers supported by AFK, Margherita worked with Mediamatic Clean Lab manager Emma Millet who provided materials on this subject. She started to experiment with fermented food, leading to important breakthroughs in understanding her allergies. She found that certain foods can be eaten in fermented form. These experiments have developed into her project, Evolving Sensitivities, which explores the causes and triggers of allergies from the perspectives of immunology, microbiology, and evolution. It includes scientific methods like skin testing to observe reactions to food allergens and analyzing bacteria in these foods.
Evolving Sensitivities is a scientific, yet art-driven, project. In order to move the research from inside of a lab to an exhibition setting and show it to a larger audience, Margherita transformed the medical testing into a performance, where the lab props became performance props. Alongside she created ‘Digestors,’ glass stomach vessels with the purpose of containing fermented food. Highlighting how this research made her rely on cooking methodologies that predigest and break down the food for her, she moved this process outside of the body quite literally. Thus, while there was a concern at first that it would turn more into scientific research, the project was art-driven and in many ways very different than a scientific investigation:
''From the way you set up and use a lab, the way you bring people together and the way you work with them is completely different; there is no protocol and it is more intuitive. Asking questions outside of the box and connecting different practices that would otherwise not meet.''
Therefore, this art project’s results and the messages embedded act as a catalyst for starting a broader conversation about allergies and food sensitivities. Coming back to Margherita’s interest in observing the world around us, Evolving Sensitivities brings to attention how not only our body but also our environment acts as a system that regulates itself.
Moreover, the discussions that emerge from this project go beyond how the body reacts to these allergens but also take into consideration the broader picture, and how environmental changes can impact our health by disrupting ecosystems. While it has been difficult to pinpoint the cause of these allergies and food-related issues in general, what recent research has shown is that the lack of diversity in farming and agriculture contributes to the rise in allergies.
''Allergy, and the fact that allergies have been on the rise in the last half-century, is like an alarm bell in modern times''
The way food is produced today has reduced our exposure to microbes and bacteria that are needed for the regulation of our body, so it is no surprise that our immune system is affected, leading to the development of allergies. Addressing this issue requires a shift towards more diverse and sustainable agricultural practices that promote environmental and human health. That is why Margherita is currently observing the connections between gut and soil during a residency at Deveron Projects in Scotland. She is doing so by working closely with local farmers who are trying to bring back the diversity in the soil, in order to reverse the imbalances we’ve created in the ecosystem over the last century.
Evolving Sensitivities is a deeply personal project that will be the main focus for many years to come for Margherita, and in her future art residencies, she plans to expand more on it. Nevertheless, while food has naturally been a prevalent theme in her works, there have also been projects that do not strictly focus on the subject of allergies, but still explore our connection with food, body and the environment.
Such a project is Skin Hunger, an immersive breakfast experience part of the Neo-Futurist Dinner series at Mediamatic, where Margherita, together with artist-chef Alice Heron explored the need for physical touch through a combination of tactile interactions and food. The event aimed to combine the different ways food can be experienced, showing how tactile experiences can complement the act of eating. The experience combines massages and breathing exercises with a five-course breakfast, creating an intimate setting to explore the relationship between food and touch.
Thus, through this work, Margherita explores again, but in a different way, the intimate link between food, our body and touch and the world that surrounds us.
