FRANCESCA PFISTER > Visual Artist
From: Born in St. Gallen to a Swiss-Italian mother and a Swiss-German father. Grew up in Switzerland, moved to New York in 1989, and since 1996 lives and works in Philadelphia.
Work: Artist/Educator.
Hobbies: Traveling, taiji, swimming, skiing, and the community garden.
Recent book: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy; Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Sun Gardens: Cyanotypes by Anna Atkins by Larry J. Schaaf.
Favorite food from Switzerland: Formaggio from the Val di Muggio in Ticino.
Favorite spot in Switzerland: Swiss/Italian border region of Ticino during the summer; the mountains around Flims in Graubünden in the winter.
What is your background?
After my art history studies in Lausanne, I moved to New York for a post-graduate program in Museum Studies. I completed a number of internships in art museums in New York and then at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. My general fascination for the city and its diversity, the prospect of a myriad of professional options in the arts, and my now-husband, who I had met by then, made me decide to stay in New York. I worked in curatorial research for a few years, first out of City Hall for the Health and Hospitals Corporation Public Art Program, surveying its art collection, which is dispersed around the city hospitals. I helped to catalog the gallerist Ileana Sonnabend’s personal collection housed in a storage space in Soho, and I finally got my dream job working at MoMA, researching the beginnings of conceptual art for three curators.
My husband’s academic appointment at Penn brought us with our two children to Philadelphia, where I got into photography and decided to take my new passion further. I got a Master of Fine Arts at PennDesign and taught in its Fine Arts Department for a few years. I now divide my time between my studio practice and teaching residencies. Exhibitions and artist residences also aliment my work. This setup provides an ideal framework for me, as I alternate between periods of intense immersion in teaching and on my own projects. Two recent, satisfying residencies were with RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency), during which I worked with materials sourced from the waste stream in an active recycling plant in North East Philadelphia, and a Caravanserai residency in Cambridge UK, where I printed with bicycle parts collected from bike shop recycling bins, working out of a caravan connected to a women’s art cooperative.
What does your work aim to say?
Using photography, with and without a camera, I explore places and things that are on the verge of losing or have lost their original function. I also collect found objects I run into - examining them like specimens or archeological artifacts to be reevaluated - and I experiment with how to make physical imprints of and with them. To me, discarded or forgotten things and spaces in transition are precious witnesses of human existence. I hope that through my work I can add to seeing beauty and potential in the process of their transformation and help illuminate the archeological treasures of the future.
What inspires you on a daily basis?
The happy encounter of opposites, communing in affinities, the nuances of light, infinite renewability of materials such as metal, the miraculous cycle of nature, small everyday things, and of course my family.
Has a favorite or most inspirational place in Switzerland influenced your artwork?
I marvel at the summers spent in the Swiss-Italian border region of the Mendrisiotto, in what I remember as a paradise-world where my four siblings, cousins and I would roam around woods and fields, seeing no dangers, with plenty of time left for me to retire with a good book in a large fireplace niche. This sheltered and open-ended time - both immersed in nature and in fictive worlds of my choosing - has marked me, and so has the exposure to different cultures within Switzerland, the cumulative learning-thinking-feeling experiences in German, Italian and French, before I moved into the East Coast melting pot of the US. My work is influenced by the intersection of multiple realities, from the encounter of cultures.
How is photography similar or different in Switzerland compared to the US?
I believe that photography today tends to address the same, basic concerns in both Switzerland and the US. We need to engage with a more globally oriented world. An increased tendency to transgress the boundaries between categories and applications within and beyond the medium of photography is noticeable. I relate to work that conveys emotion and am sensitive to the intermingling of local and global perspectives, personal voices within our multi-cultural world. I have found these qualities in work exhibited in museums and galleries both in the US and in Switzerland.
Are you working on any project right now?
I just finished wrapping up a teaching residency in a public high school in South Philadelphia, making sun prints with a group of teenagers on the school’s roof. In my own practice, I work, usually at the same time, on several interconnected series that focus on different aspects of my ongoing interests as an artist. I shift from visually exploring defunct manufacturing facilities around Philadelphia to a recording found objects with my camera, to making cyanotypes using objects that interest me, to experimenting with physical imprints of inked objects that I run through an etching press. I have mostly focused on the urban environment until now. In a couple of new projects, my ‘garden trophies’ and ‘ocean rejects’, I am moving my attention to intersections of culture and nature.
If you could buy any work of art in the world, what would it be?
I admire the work of many artists. Since relocating to the US, I was first interested in Robert Rauschenberg’s combines, prints, screens, theater props, and travel photography. Gordon Matta Clark’s interventions in buildings about to be destroyed also fascinate me. In terms of artists who are more strictly photographers, I have always felt an affinity with Bernd and Hilla Becher’s industrial typologies of Europe and the US. I also find a kinship of spirit with the video installations by Swiss artists Pippilotti Rist and Beat Streuli, Rist for her refreshing and funny takes on the self and beyond, and Streuli for his humanistic voyeurism that addresses individualism and anonymity at once.
What do you miss most about Switzerland?
I most miss my family, but I am fortunate to be able to go back and spend time with my parents, siblings, and their families on a regular basis. I sometimes also miss the outdoors in Switzerland and being more physically active, which seems to be a more natural and fluid part of everyday life there than here in the frenetic urban areas of the East Coast.
Gray Brushes A, North Philadelphia (from Obsolete Objects), 16 x 16 inches / 40.6 x 40.6 cm, archival pigment print, 2018
Additional information on her work:
http://rairphilly.org/francesca-pfister
http://printcenter.org/2012comp/FrancescaPfister/francescapfister2.html