Melissa Ghidini

My name is Melissa Ghidini and I'm currently based in Milan. My background is in Art as well as Literature and writing. I graduated from Goldsmiths University in English Literature and followed an MA in transnational creative writing at Stockholm University. I've co-founded and was part of two collectives, one of which I'm still co-running now. While in London I was part of RUN; an artist and self-managed collective working on mix-media. We used to work independently using whatever we could get from university in terms of spaces and equipment. After a few years of travelling and personal research, I've come back to Milan and felt a need to work with fluidity as a structuring tool for my work and so MELMA, the collective I represent and am part of, was a natural reaction to that. In the collective, I've devised and worked on group exhibitions, art editorial projects and independent research.

My current ongoing project Fair Play is an independent research project documenting the experience of many artists, collectives and curators who are trying to destabilise and subvert standardised art dynamics while also building a support network. I'm organising round table discussions on and for independent artist run spaces, DIY collectives and artists that are trying to look for new ways of supporting the local and international art scene. So far we've had one meeting where I invited many artists and curators from independent music producers to project spaces. We spoke about sustainability, struggles and joys of creating unconventional spaces for artists and projects; of ways of coping with institutions and of compromising; questions around independence, hierarchies that collectives and singles are subjected to. We've asked ourselves: is it possible to avoid them? how can we collaborate in a more horizontal way? how can we navigate domesticity when our studios/exhibition spaces are also our homes? how can we avoid mimicking the white cube? what pushes us to create?