Fabrizio Previti
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Interview by Giovanni Bartolini
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Published in October 2025
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Twenty-one days ago, on the fifth floor of an even-numbered address along Via Tadino, T, discoursed with quiet erudition on the concept of Ma—the functional autonomy of emptiness, pause and interruption.
What follows is an extract from a dialogue spanning 1,095 days, operating through the degrees of separation that discourse brings to the surface of the white page. It deliberately functions beyond context, within an unspecified cognitive horizon—as though the reader, immersed in coffee and cigarettes at some café, happened upon two voices conversing at the adjacent table.
A single contextual note: Fabrizio Previti is a mixed-media artist who situates reading at the center of his artistic practice.
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I begin with the recognition of the naturalistic fallacy inherent to the epistemological model – namely, the problematic nature of defining and reconstructing the specific perimeter of knowledge itself. Now a process of finding, now a protuberance of the self, the artistic research oscillates incessantly between the activity of perception and that of apperception. Given this liminal threshold between observer and observed, between discovery and creation, how do you negotiate the epistemological boundaries that define your artistic enquiry?
For me, maintaining mobility within any field of inquiry is essential—the self naturally tends toward stratification, particularly during creative processes. This tendency generates what I call an archaeology of memory: a reading of our past that presents my works as mirrors reflecting the self. Images and words function simultaneously as expression and research tools, revealing reality as our fundamental relationship to the world. In Articulations for a Lovers' Discourse, for instance, two lovers communicate exclusively through social media. This deliberate choice dissolves the boundary between real and unreal, presenting love not as something inherent or "natural," but as a performative construct—a self-representation of desire filtered through digital mediation. Within this oscillation between authentic and constructed experience lies both archaeological excavation and psychological externalization: the simultaneous unearthing and exposure of the self.
Sicunta, 2023
Where does the difference lie between writing and photography?
Writing and photography serve as vehicles for externalizing myself through action and reflection, transforming me into a medium that channels personal experience into otherwise vacant projects. Their fundamental difference lies in how each engages with temporality. I gravitate toward reconstructing life situations, memories, and elements that have been lost or forgotten—writing and photography become tools for recomposing these fragments. Photography suspends death by freezing moments; writing perpetuates life by sustaining motion. Where photography extracts a slice from temporal flow and preserves it, writing keeps that same slice dynamic, extending it through space and time to accumulate layers of meaning.
The Book of Sketches materializes this temporal experience through language, where I attempt to sustain the materialization process itself. Through cascading words, I construct not an identity but an alterity—an image of myself as time incarnate. Photography functions as incision, writing as current: one arrests movement, the other prolongs it. Both, however, render word and image tangible—and in my understanding, these can sometimes reveal themselves as fundamentally identical phenomena.
The Book of Sketches, ongoing
By reconfiguring our understanding of linguistic patterns and destabilizing memory's assumed permanence, you delve into the simulation of the subject-object relationship itself. We've explored at length how falsification processes form the cornerstone of your practice, permeating both image-making and textual construction. Your work inhabits what might be called a present-remote temporality—a liminal duration suspended between completion and continuous becoming.
Within this temporal horizon, compositional processes of falsification and admixture allow inert and organic elements to coexist in dynamic tension. Here, memory becomes animate: it breathes, crystallizes into form, mimics perceptual experience, and achieves its own autonomous reality. Could you elaborate on this metamorphic process?
I reach toward the present, yet melancholy shadows me—a companion emotion that mirrors what I seek to express in my narratives. The memory that surfaces most persistently is of myself as a child on our home balcony, lost in play. Those afternoons after school, in primary or secondary years, before venturing outside with friends—I would remain with my toys, constructing elaborate stories. I positioned myself by the balcony railing, window thrown open to welcome the breeze. Within that liminal space, melancholy would settle over me, an indefinable absence I still cannot decode. My life felt ephemeral then, transient—and continues to feel so now.
What I strive to preserve is the essence of those suspended afternoons: the sensation of that child weaving stories at the balcony's edge, the warm scirocco wind, the weight of summer light. For me, art performs what life fragments—it reunites the scattered pieces of experience into coherent meaning.
Shadow of the vampire, 2025
Subject and object constitute the essential foundation of any simulation process. Within this context, what vulnerabilities arise when the self assumes a poly-performative role—functioning simultaneously as both the observer and the observed?
I recognize two distinct dimensions: a private realm encompassing confession, will, ambition, narcissism, and self-reflection, and a public sphere where these elements materialize into artistic objects legible to others.
The resulting work resembles therapy made visible—for me, it becomes a body "etherized" upon an operating table, exposed for observation and analysis. When analysis occurs, I choose to be that “etherized” form: embodied in falsehoods that function as answers—false precisely because they are true, real because they embrace fabrication. Within this body offered to public scrutiny lies my self-examination: it may illuminate or obscure, succeed or fail. The reader must decipher what they feel capable of understanding. Behind the performative mask, I believe, exists a receptacle—a vessel containing everything we've been discussing. If I had to identify my most intensive practice, it wouldn't be writing or photography, but reading itself. I consider reading a fundamental discipline; I haven't yet integrated it into performance because I haven't discovered the appropriate medium, but I am constituted by my readings—not merely books and films, but lived experiences. This is why The Book of Sketches represents me in its purest form: my readings stripped to their essence. Behind this mask of paper, tape, and ink—perhaps the most corporeal thing I possess, the truest because it corresponds to my physical being—lie my narratives and utterances: the accumulated sum of how I read reality.
Diario di buonabitacolo, 2024
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︎ @fabracciopreviti
fabpreviti.myportfolio.com
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If you like this why not read our interview with Jessica Ashman.
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