Catia Colagioia (b. 2001, she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher from South Philadelphia with a BA (’24) from the University of Pennsylvania in fine art. Catia's process is rooted in her traversal of Philadelphia, in her collection and resurrection of found objects, in the investigation of the objects' memories, and in the systems that deemed those objects obsolete, useless, trash.
There is a shifty logic applied to the objects she uses through her attempts to construct something physically unfamiliar yet already existent within her psyche. While her work possesses an uncanny, angelic quality, it also embodies the systems she references, and their by-products, their shoddy barriers, and their hypocriticalities. She applies care and repair as methodologies, tending closely to the desires of the objects she uses. There is a desire to carry the objects past their status as waste, and into a new territory, where they may allow their properties and histories to communicate in service of something larger.
click here to view my cv.
audio recorded on March 28, 2024 at 3201 Cuthbert Street (construction site owned by Gattuso Vigilant Holdings) with inter-spliced audio of trees being cut down & dried bark being manipulated. 1 hour 30 minutes 53 seconds, looped for the length of the gallery day.
2 ft 2 in x 3 ft 9 in x 6 ft 5 in
construction elevator (vigilant holding) (2024) is a resurrective gesture. It is a monument built with precarity, mirroring the shoddy systems that have produced each piece of the sculpture, and deemed nearly each one as waste. Within this structure, an anomaly is suspended: hollowed bark that sings–bark that is reanimated, and privileged with the ability to conduct sound. The screeching of a construction elevator is followed by silence, then birds, and then the visceral screech of a saw, and the cracking of tree bark–a droning soundscape that induces remembrance of the moment of loss–the moment where each thing ceases to exist as it was. On an actual level, the work tends to the context within which it exists. The bark conducts sound, and the elevator is a monument to mark the common experience of space & waste, of destruction & construction. On some transcendent level, this work travels through time and liveness; it prods the fantastical. It's a somehow-magical device that muses on the nature of change, of memory, of capture, recall, and relay. Upon noticing the wooden feathers that float within the tensely pulled chains and the delicately crocheted pieces of twine that cascade through the steel cutouts, framed by turned pine spindles, the monument becomes a memorial to all that will be "what once was," touched by a caring hand.
- projection performance,
performance, 7 min 8 sec; video document 6 min 45 sec
2' 2" x 2' 2" x 6' 1" x 42 minutes 37 seconds
-
brick facade fragments from 1100 E Passyunk Ave, unfired
- clay, window weights
- dimensions variable
- window screen, key, pressure, twine, branch. fishing
- weights light, brackets, screws
- 45 x 35 in.
- stapled, laserjet zine, found wood, burned to charcoal
- zine: 8.5 in x 7 in
performance of varying duration, size expansive
This project was born out of a knee injury that I sustained. Finding proper care for the injury, as well as care for my generalized chronic pain has been frustrating... Knee braces don't seem to help, and other contraptions are expensive. I began to picture my leg as a sapling on the city street with tension supports (that you often find flopped over) strapped to it, and I thought about how these saplings are situated in such a hostile environment, with fumes everywhere, surrounded by pipes and concrete, forced to grow around them. I thought about how our own bodies are in a similar situation, and how our systems of care can oftentimes fall short, just as those saplings’ tension supports fall down.
I decided to collect these frustrations and channel them into this exploration, so that I could get back into my body, and turn these points of frustration into points of imagination and play. I’ve been recording videos with a camera strapped to my affected leg to understand its perspective and the pain as it accumulates. I’ve also been collecting objects of care like crutches and braces, collecting objects that articulate like knees, casting them into concrete, and putting my body into and around these objects, exploring them, and exploring my own physical abilities. I’m really excited to continue working on this project and to continue examining the relationships between frustration, play, systems of care, industry, the built environment, and the body.
8 in x 10 in
With the recent boom in development in Philadelphia, there are palpable feelings of invasion, vulnerability, and theft. It feels like a dark cloud passing over the community, as many of my neighbors and my family–just like so many folks from other low-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia and beyond–are being actively pushed out of their communities.The photographs focus on sites of development, surveillance devices, and barriers to entry (physical and legal)–from dismembered chain link fences and tall black wooden barriers to signs that note police limits or the invocation of the threat of legal consequence (trespassing violation) to a once publicly accessible park.
While printing the photographs, I utilized a photogram technique to create another layer of obstruction. The semiotics of the photogrammed objects (barbed wire and chain link) are complicated, invoking a careless claim to ownership, invoking the racist and classist history of trespassing laws, and more simply, standing as a bulletin for outdated zoning permits and graffitied construction company signs, a reminder of the cascading and lasting damage of colonial land dynamics.
aka NOTICE, 2022
edition of 50 per print, disseminated to [redacted] at [redacted] to be altered and posted at sites where notice is necessary.
11 x 17 in
- unbound risograph and laserjet zine
- 8.5 in x 7 in
It explores the personal, interpersonal, and systemic conflicts that stem from the root of truth and remembrance: dis/misinformation, broken relationships, personal struggles to grasp reality, and more.