The 71st ARTCaffè featured artist Tracey Snelling, who joined the online event from her studio in Berlin.
During the session, Tracey shared insights into her multimedia art practice, which encompasses sculpture, installation, performance, video, and photography.

The journey started from her early experimentation with photography, negatives, old photographs, vintage magazines, and the collages that informed her following practice. In particular, the pinnacle piece 1881 Chestnut Street inspired her to make three dimensional sculptures.

With her work 11:55am, she said, “I came to a point where the work really changed. I was always fascinated by motels. Growing up in California, when I was young, we would travel in a travel trailer and camp at campgrounds, but we also sometimes stayed in motels that were kind of magical places. They had stories. This piece (Motel, 2002) became my muse.”

With Woman on the Run (2008-2012) Tracey added video, performance, and installation to an already multilayered practice. An homage to film noir, the work is also “a feminist piece about the role women are placed in.”

Taking part in artistic residencies and programs abroad, together with her willingness to explore new realities, expanded her horizon even further: “I really love to travel, document my experiences, and then to recreate what I saw. To me, it’s not important to be exact or measured to scale, it is more about my impression of the place and of the people. It is not just the building. What is interesting to me, throughout my work and my travels is how people live, what do we have in common, and what is their daily life.”

Those experiences abroad enriched her narrative with more topics, all related to our challenging times.

To name a few:

• the many issues due to social housing, when poorly planned;
• global poverty: “With ‘One Thousand Shacks’ I wanted to shine a light on the issue of global poverty because it’s an immense issue that is not going away and I think often people want to ignore it. The work is about the whole of humanity, but it also addresses lack of adequate housing, lack of safe water, food, … different subjects within the large subject. I built it so it was tall to overwhelm the viewer. In real life, it’s loud, there are sounds coming from the videos, it’s chaotic, and it’s something you can’t ignore.”
• global warming, the pandemic: “The idea behind the work ‘How to Build a Disaster-Proof House’ is that with covid, global warming, with everything that is going on in the world, it is difficult to find a safe place. But the safe place is internal, so you must find it in yourself, because that’s the only place that really exists to be safe.”
• the struggle of love and relationships amid the loneliness of overcrowded cities: “’Tenement Rising’ is more about overcrowded, large cities packing people in. But, it’s also about how you can be alone and even lonely when you are surrounded by so many people.”

In a nutshell, Tracey pointed at the anxieties and struggles of a humanity that sometimes seems to have lost its purpose. Also, she shed light on the importance to reflect upon the past, to treasure memories as a key to think over our experiences – both the bad and the good ones, – hence working hard towards a better world within a better environment.