Cécile di Giovanni’s practice explores how fragments of popular culture, from media narratives and historical events to fictional spaces and mass-produced objects, can serve as symbolic materials for reshaping personal and collective memory.
Through installations, sculptures, and speculative environments, she reactivates these cultural traces, revealing their potential as emotionally charged vessels for nostalgia, trauma, or projection. By employing processes of reconstitution and détournement, she examines how mass-mediated imagery, deeply embedded in domestic settings and generational memory, can be transformed into sites of intimate resonance or subtle disruption. Her practice often circles around ideas of home and homecoming, approaching them as unstable thresholds between reality and imagination, a way of inhabiting fictions to revisit the places, myths, and memories that shape belonging.
My work seeks to explore how this sense of belonging, this symbolic territory, can be critically revisited and reactivated through artistic practice. In doing so, I often engage with narratives marked by ambivalence or catastrophe, reworking them as spaces of personal projection, cultural memory, and ethical questioning. These stories, whether tragic, mythologized, or culturally fraught, become lenses through which to interrogate how we inhabit fiction, and how fiction, in turn, inhabits us.
