Interview
FRANCESCA BUSCA francescabusca.com
Philosophy and art share many parallels, both aim to provoke dialogue within the viewer. Questioning our beliefs and shaping them. Artist Francesca Busca strongly believes that art has a deeper purpose, using her craft to convey a message, as strongly as her creative and technical abilities will allow. Focussing on social and environmental issues, Francesca is haunted by the idea of humankind’s imminent self-destruction. There’s only so much that uncontrolled consumerism and its resulting contamination and pollution that one tiny planet can take. Yet, she believes we have hope in the form of rethinking and repurposing. Combining discarded materials with traditional mediums, she plays with colours and textures in her pieces. Her goal is to change the way we view rubbish and look at it as a valuable resource, constantly pushing the limits of the repurposed materials she incorporates. With a true passion for mosaic, she strives to show the beauty and significance of each material used. How important is it for you that art provokes a response from the viewer? Very much so – it is the purpose of everything I do. To me, art is a message, a provocation to the viewer. It has to be reciprocal: unleashing the burden of my obsessive thoughts by expressing them to the viewer, and the viewer seizing the provocation and engaging with them. If either one of these two aspects is missing, I feel like I failed my purpose and my artwork becomes either merely decorative or worthless…given that I mainly use rubbish for my pieces, I guess it would probably be the latter!
How do you think we can bring about a fundamental change with regards to humanity’s perception of rubbish? Well, every little helps. I try to raise environmental awareness both in my daily behaviour and in my artwork, regardless of the main message each piece conveys, by making them almost entirely with rubbish. I am hoping this is a way to make people “re-think, re-use, re-purpose and reduce”. Is it really worth throwing all these things away? Could they not be reused rather than replaced? Plastic is a fantastic invention, but should it not be limited to uses such as essential parts of medical equipment or engineering works? How did people live before plastic came to be? There are so many alternatives to disposable plastic, have we forgotten them all? My children 62