CASTRO presents a CRIT with Dakota Guo and Natalya Marconini Falconer moderated by Fabiola Fiocco. A CRIT is a public meeting in which two artists present their work and offer it to collective critique. CASTRO organizes one CRIT session every month, involving both local and international artists, in order to create moments of encounter and dialogue among different audiences. During CRIT sessions, artists are invited to briefly introduce their work; afterwards, the discussion is shaped by contributions from the audience, who share their viewpoints, comments, and questions, thus activating a dialogue with the artists. CRIT sessions function as collective rituals and can become occasions for negotiating shared values and meanings.
On this occasion, two artists participating in CASTRO’s Studio Program Turn#09 will present their work. The Studio Program is a free and experimental educational program that each year hosts a group of five artists and researchers, providing them with a studio space and a tailored program of educational activities built around their artistic practices and research interests. The event is open to a diverse audience interested in critical discussion of contemporary art: local and international artists, students, enthusiasts, and cultural professionals.
The event will take place in the first-floor room dedicated to UNAROMA LIVE.
Free admission until capacity is reached.
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CASTRO is an experimental education project founded in Rome in 2018 by artist Gaia Di Lorenzo. The project is structured around three main programs: the Studio Program, the Public Program, and the Academia Program. Through the Studio Program, CASTRO hosts each year a group of artists and researchers, offering them studio space and a series of tailor-made educational activities. The Public Program consists of a series of free, public events such as CRIT, conferences, and artist talks. Since 2023, CASTRO has also inaugurated a library dedicated to alternative education and radical pedagogy, collectively built through the regular contributions of artists, researchers, and educators, both Italian and international. Finally, the Academia Program offers a series of activities that enable the creation of individual learning paths through portfolio reviews, workshops, mentoring courses, and tutoring.
DAKOTA GUO (Taiyan, China, 1994) works across performance, video, installation, objects, text, and sound to explore the complex relationships and (im)material exchanges between the living and the (un)dead. Drawing on Chinese cosmologies and necrologies, Guo traces a “body–ghost” continuum in which necrological infrastructures mediate and sustain the underworld, or the yin realm. Their ongoing research project, Tools for Speculative Archaeology (2023–ongoing), reimagines archaeological methods as a practice of ritual violation and spectral inscription. Together with Miyoung Chang, Guo initiated a duo project dedicated to East Asian horror cinema, Chu Renmei & Hyejoo, and is a founding member of the Rotterdam-based SOUPSPOON Collective.
NATALYA MARCONINI FALCONER (London, United Kingdom, 1997)’s practice originates from gaps in the familial and regional memory of places. Working with these voids of memory, she accumulates the material traces left behind by cycles of industry, migration, and natural events linked to Southern Italy. Moving across sculpture, installation, and writing, she uses stratification as a technique to mirror the way the past folds into lived experience. By tracing what has been left behind, her work focuses on the “chronometric” potential of materials: their ability to retain memory and sensation when the body can no longer do so. Marconini Falconer works between London and Italy. She earned an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she was awarded the Sarabande: Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation Scholarship, and she holds a BA in English Literature from UCL. In 2025, she exhibited at Fondazione Elpis, The Bomb Factory (UK), and Cafe OTO (UK).