Andrea Celeste La Forgia

Showing my project “Pasta is no longer the Past” as part of Prospect at @art_rotterdam 2026, 26–29 March at Rotterdam Ahoy. This body of work begins from a collaboration between myself and my mother, a life-long pasta factory worker in Rimini, Italy. Throughout the exhibition, small live rehearsals with my mother Anita Muollo and fellow performer Sarah Atzori will take place in the space. Times below, see you there! March 26, 6 & 8 PM March 27-28, 3 & 5 PM Performed by Andrea Celeste La Forgia & Anita Muollo March 29, 3 & 5 PM Performed by Andrea Celeste La Forgia & Sarah Atzori (@sarah_atzori_ ) Thank you @mondriaanfonds for making this work possible 🦋

🎭 TOOLSHED: Collective Puppetry-Making Workshop 🎭 ✨ Recap & Session 2 this Friday! With great joy, we look back on the first Puppetry-Making Workshop last Friday, 8 May ✨ Missed it, or didn’t get the chance to finish your puppet yet? Good news: this Friday, TOOLSHED residents @andreabluish & @keremlakar return for the second session of this free two-part workshop at Kunstinstituut Melly! Join artists and theatre makers Andrea Celeste La Forgia and Kerem Akar for a FREE workshop exploring puppetry, storytelling, and collective creation. Using plaster, fabric, and found materials, participants design and build their own puppets, then bring them to life through simple theatre exercises involving voice, movement, and character development. Participants are encouraged to attend the second session on 15 May to continue and complete their puppets. 💫 The outcomes of the workshop will contribute to a collective presentation in the TOOLSHED space at Kunstinstituut Melly! Part of TOOLSHED #2: The Imaginary Stage. TOOLSHED is a residency and research initiative by Kunstinstituut Melly that explores the tools we use today to build, question, and transform cultural institutions. 📅 Friday 15 May 2026 🕕 6–9 pm 📍 Space for Education and Participation, Kunstinstituut Melly 🎟 Free entrance ➜ don’t forget to sign up via the link in bio! Photos by Floor Besuijen

Last month I showed 'Pasta is no longer the past' at Prospects 2026 for this year’s edition of @art_rotterdam , curated by @daphneverberg and @elvisgustavsson . 🦋🦋🦋 'Pasta is no longer the past' begins from an ongoing collaboration between myself and my mother Anita, a lifelong pasta factory worker in my hometown, Rimini. The project brings into direct relation the factory and the space of art-making. It asks how social class, labour, and creativity are lived across generations, and what it means to inherit a struggle for imagination within conditions that organise time, body, and value. A line of industrial lasagna sheets framed by used factory boxes runs across the wall at approximately one meter high, the height of the machine my mother works on daily. The line resembles a conveyor belt, the backbone of the factory. The sheets are marked with drawings, motifs, and fragments from my mother’s diary she kept as a child. A rare act of creativity, lost to factory work. The lasagna sheets becomes a site of class analysis: a mass-produced industrial product becomes the surface through which traces of the struggle between work, labour and leisure, and where the material conditions of working-class experience are articulated. A recurring motif of butterflies - 🦋 farfalle 🦋 - appears across both the boxes and the lasagna sheets, introducing a soft but persistent disruption to the system. Already a pasta shape, here hint at a transformation: from the industrial to the imaginary. The butterflies do not overwrite the logic of production, they seep into it, like a form of excess that cannot be fully contained, measured, extracted, or standardised. They suggest a quiet materialisation of workers’ hopes, dreams, desires and imagination embedded within the very structures that organise their labour. Made with the support of @mondriaanfonds , friends, family, and my mother, whose working-class knowledge, tools and imagination became for me methods, critical frameworks and sites of creative agency. Photographs by @tommysmits.tommysmits

🎭 Meet the residents of TOOLSHED #2: The Imaginary Stage TOOLSHED is a residency and research initiative by Kunstinstituut Melly that explores the tools we use today to build, question, and transform cultural institutions. The programme invites artists, cultural practitioners, researchers, and collectives to critically reflect on conventional institutional frameworks while developing interdisciplinary practices that expand the capacity of art spaces to engage meaningfully with their surroundings. Located on the second floor of Melly, TOOLSHED is a dynamic experimental space for reflection, discussion, experimentation, and action. For its second edition, TOOLSHED welcomes artists Andrea Celeste La Forgia @andreabluish and Kerem Akar @keremlakar , whose joint residency focuses on the relationship between labour, social class, migration, and collective forms of learning and making. 👀 Puppetry workshops at Melly coming soon! 🔗 Curious about TOOLSHED? More info in bio Supported by @amartefonds

Looking back at these stills from ‘Slippages Of The Mouth’, a performance @andreabluish and I did during last year’s edition of BUNA where we situated the mouth as a stage and the tongue as a site of revolt. 👅🗯️ Thank you @buna.varna for the exciting opportunity to perform in my home town and @radfilms.pro for the documentation 🪡

Once the curtain closes, what is a mouth and what is a stage? Sooo excited to perform the new piece @andreabluish and I have been working on for this year’s @buna.varna 👅🗯️ 4 September 19:00h @rebonkers.varna Biting, spitting, chewing, swallowing, gagging, ‘Slippages of the Mouth’ is a performance where four characters linger over the taste of feminist class struggle and the slippery tensions between labour, the gendered body, identity and performance.  By situating the mouth as a stage and the tongue as a site of revolt, the performance gapes open the vulnerability of bringing the foreign inside, casting all characters into question.

Recently I found a photograph of my mother as a child riding a carousel in the South of Italy where she grew up. In 1930 Walter Benjamin began a radio broadcast called “A Carousel of Jobs” by asking of his listeners: “Put yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, in the place of a fourteen-year-old who has just finished Volksschule and now must choose an occupation. Think of the mostly schematic, fleeting images of occupations that hover before his eyes. Does this not call to mind a carousel, a carousel of occupations, which whizzes past the eager candidate so quickly that he is unable to study the several positions it offers?”. What matters, is not just finding one’s proper place in the workforce, but preparing oneself to fit quickly into a new occupation. Upon leaving school, caught in the impasse between speed and stillness, my mother jumped on that carousel and is still working the same factory job thirty years later. A Carousel of Jobs (after Walter Benjamin), 2025 oil on linen 90 x 90 cm Documentation by @silvia__arenas

My mother has spent her working life on the production line of a pasta factory in Rimini, often working in refrigerated conditions. Looking back at old Italian Communist Party (PCI) campaigns, one from 1968 stood out, titled “I cittadini in frigorifero”. The translation is something along the lines of “citizens in the fridge”. It reminded me of my mother, her working conditions and her long factory shifts in the refrigerator. This painting combines the trofie machinery from my mother’s factory with falling heads from the PCI campaign, a juxtaposition between past(a) and present. I cittadini nelle trofie (Citizens in the trofie), 2024 oil and mixed media on wood 40 x 46 cm Documentation by @silvia__arenas

montage operaista Nanni Balestrini at @afgallerybologna + ‘Funerali di Togliatti’, Renato Guttuso, 1972 at @mambobologna

Blending fiction and archival material, ‘Vrouwenproblemen: spinning the Mechanisms of Troublemaking’ is a polyphonic choral piece created by Andrea Celeste La Forgia (@andreabluish ) & Gloriya Avgust (@gloriyaavgust ), the original event was produced by Reading Room Rotterdam and hosted at @a_tale_of_a_tub , Rotterdam.

While those who attended the opening night of ‘Spinning Jenny’ got to see the live performance, video documentation can be seen at our current exhibition until March 3rd! ⏰Opening Hours:
Fridays 16:00 - 20:00 Saturdays & Sundays 13:00 - 17:00 ✨ Curated by: Emma van Noort (@e.vannoort ) 📸 Photography: @jaimekorbee *Taxpayers support this exhibition, and @mondriaanfonds @pictoright @cultuurfonds @gemeenteleiden #SpinningJenny #InSharedAir #TROEFExhibitions #WomenInArt #LeidenEvents

After 25 years of factory work, my grandfather was gifted a ceramic chandelier by the factory management. It now hangs in my grandmother's tiny rental apartment in Rimini, the same apartment they moved in when they migrated from the South of Italy in the 1980s. The embodiment of his lifetime commitment to the factory, and ultimately a cluster of surplus labour, promises, fantasies of return, a compensation for a working life on the assembly line, an endless deferral. Labour at the moment of its disappearance, in the instances of its affective negation. 'Portrait of my grandfather as a ceramic chandelier', 2024 oil and mixed media on linen 90 x 90 cm documentation by @silvia__arenas

Last Saturday @__max___f and I performed a reading of a collaborative translation of a short, until now untranslated children’s story by Elsa Morante, ‘When Piuma Knocked Out Massimo’ (1942). The text (extracts of which are shown above), in this instance has been adapted into a theatrical script for the reading. It’s an anomaly within Morante’s oeuvre of work, something that she published in her thirties but claimed to have written aged thirteen. A work that she was never entirely comfortable with, an early edition was published in 1942 with a small print run, before it was republished to a mass audience by Italian publisher Einaudi in 1959. On a personal level, Morante was a lifelong anti-fascist, and was narrowly talked out of dropping a pot of boiling oil on Mussolini’s open-top car as it passed below her Rome apartment. While not an overt critique of fascism, the story is an overt critique of inequality and the hardship faced by many, with the tale’s protagonists, Piuma and Massimo, looking for a way out, a better life. A predecessor to the neorealist literature and film of the post-war period, as a children’s tale it escaped the censorship of many of Morante’s contemporaries. Thank you to @kate_rebecca_price and @tomaszn999 for reading with us. Thank you @rib_rotterdam for hosting and @cbkrotterdam for funding this project. More translations and plays to come xxx