Photo credits
1. Derek MF Di Fabio during “hhhh (Solidarity as Radical Dependency)”. Performance. ACC, Weimar 2023. Photo: Miiel Ferráez.2. Derek MF Di Fabio, paper arm prop (detail). 2023.
3. Derek MF Di Fabio. Photo by Dandelion Eghosa.
4. Derek MF Di Fabio at 夜消 Night Dissipation, Rotterdam 2024. Manipulation: M.C. Julie Yu. Host and photo: Maoyi.
Derek MF Di Fabio
ENG
Artist statement
I engage with the possibilities of bodies' presence in space and question how knowledge is transmitted across bodies and generations, particularly by looking at the power dynamics that dominate them.
Echoing the feminist hymn “the personal is political,” my work is often layered with collaborations with other people/entities and longed for dismantling the importance that humans give to a language that cannot speak of loss, and thus grief is taken over by dominant power.
I am interested in objects that appear all over the world and in different cultures as primal materializations of gestures and needs. I believe that the separation of subject/object and perception/reality, typical of Western knowledge production, is motivated by political choices rather than physical realities. For this reason, instead, I always anticipate and experiment with the use of other methodologies to orient us in the world. At the Watch Turm, I’ll continue to develop a story around borders and memory loss on a collective and individual level. What are the material factors that retain and develop memory and what are the factors, material and non-material, that obfuscate narratives and bodies?
Derek MF Di Fabio (they/them) grew up in Italy and lives in Berlin.