Animales Vivos
Curated by Marta Fernandez Calvo
The Joinery
June 2012, Dublin

Animales Vivos is an ongoing urban experiment featuring site-specific projects by Italian artist 
Helga Franza ‘in conversation’ with Marta Fernández Calvo. The project will start in Stoneybatter 
at  The Joinery gallery, a lane (Chicken Lane) and will travel to a beach (Sandymount Strand) and 
a public institution (the Italian Institute of Culture). The core of Animales Vivos will be a solo 
exhibition by Helga Franza at The Joinery. Franza’s work is an interpretation of space that materialises 
through a wide range of techniques and themes/subjects of work. Her work at The Joinery will consist 
of an intricate arrangement of fabric sculptures, drawings on different media and a series of journals’ 
front pages – that she will make during her stay in Dublin. On the opening night there will be a performance
using a spam archive that she has been collecting since 2001.
During the course of the show, Franza will make a site-specific work –  on Sandymount Strand to capture that 
very specific moment in time of her ‘being in Dublin’. Sandymount Strand will constitute the beginning point 
for Animales Vivos’ next edition. This whole process of work will be filmed and presented at a closing event 
at the Italian Institute of Culture, 11 Fitzwillian Square East, Dublin 2.

Helga Franza is based in Milan since 1990. Her practice is multidisciplinary. She uses painting, drawing, sculpture, 
performance, web based works and curatorial projects. She obsessively explores the act of drawing through 
different media – sewing, wire wall reliefs, sketchbook drawing, and in this way her work becomes sculptural. 
When exhibited her works offer an intrincate arrangement of outcomes, results and maneuvres that suggest 
the possibility of an alternative multi-dimensional vision of a world made by phenomenal objects and information.
foto by joynery