Through painting, landscape, and dialogue, I investigate the invisible structures that shape contemporary reality.
ANTONINO LA VELA
Marsala (Italy), 1971
Based in Turin, Italy
ARTIST | WRITER | INDEPENDENT RESEARCHER
I am an Italian artist, writer, and independent researcher whose work explores the relationship between visibility and invisibility across personal, social, political, and ecological landscapes.
Much of contemporary art tends to define artistic identity through recognizable visual languages, recurring aesthetics, or biographical categories. While these approaches can be valuable, I am interested in a different path. I do not see artistic identity as something that should be confined within a stable visual formula or a fixed set of subjects. For me, such expectations risk limiting the very freedom that art makes possible.
Rather than building a practice around a recognizable aesthetic signature, I work from a conceptual framework centered on visibility and invisibility. This perspective allows me to move across different media, subjects, and territories while remaining rooted in the same investigation. Whether I am working with painting, writing, dialogue, or site-specific interventions, I am asking variations of the same question: what remains unseen, and why?
Working through painting, site-specific projects, and writing, I investigate the hidden structures that shape what societies choose to see and what they allow to disappear. My practice is driven by an interest in memory, environmental change, identity, collective trauma, and the fragile connections between people, places, and systems.
EDUCATION & FORMATION
Degree in Communication Sciences
University of Bologna, Italy
Painting and Drawing Workshops
Marsala, Sicily (1987–1990)
Independent Research in Contemporary Art,
Visual Culture and New Media
Bristol, United Kingdom (2000–2005)
SELECTED SITE-SPECIFIC PROJECTS
Bunker 0 (2026)
Climate memory, sea level rise, and the transformation of the Mediterranean landscape.
Absent Swing (2026)
A suspended intervention exploring absence, loss, and collective remembrance.
SELECTED ART PROJECTS
Curriculum of Rejections (2025–ongoing)
Sex for Dummy (2025)
The Human Remains (2025–2026)
Mediterranean Dying (2025)
WRITING & RESEARCH
Contributor to Artribune.
Author of essays and interviews on contemporary art, ecology, feminism, performance, visibility, and social transformation.
Interviews and critical conversations with:
Marina Abramović
Judy Chicago
Catherine Opie
Robin Tewes (Guerrilla Girls)
Aviva Rahmani
Michelangelo Pistoletto
Nadia Tolokonnikova (Pussy Riot)
ARCHIVE OF WRITING
More than 550 published articles, essays, interviews, and critical texts on contemporary art and culture.
CURRENT RESEARCH INTERESTS
Visibility and invisibility as social forces.
Landscapes as archives of memory.
Ecological transformation and loss.
Collective trauma and cultural forgetting.
The relationship between art, testimony, and public consciousness.