Francesca Grosso @ Rome Art Week

Francesca Grosso

Multidisciplinary Artist | Founder of Duemila Voci Contemporary Art Projects

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Francesca Grosso is a multidisciplinary artist, flutist, painter, and writer. She is the founder of the contemporary art projects Duemila Voci (2018) and the creator of the Artistic-Social Calligram, a practice that emerges from the collection of texts, interviews, and collective testimonies, transforming the written word into visual matter and reinterpreting the calligram within a social and choral dimension.

Her artistic research moves across word, mark, color, and sound, developing a synesthetic language in which visual arts, writing, performance, and music converge. Recurring themes in her work include the relationship between the individual and the collective, otherness, the fragility of the human figure and memory, human rights, information overload, and the ambiguities of language.

Following a classical musical education, she graduated with honors in Flute from the “Santa Cecilia” Conservatory in Rome in 2010. In 2013, she obtained a degree in Performing Arts and Sciences from “La Sapienza” University of Rome, with a thesis in Ethnomusicology focusing on contemporary issues of listening within the urban soundscape. She continued her advanced musical studies at the Italian Flute Academy and took part in masterclasses with internationally renowned musicians.

Although she had been devoted to painting since childhood, she began presenting her work publicly in 2017, when she received the Fabrizio De André Award for Painting for her work La Cattiva Strada. In 2018, she developed the first Duemila Voci projects, based on the direct involvement of individuals and the transformation of their words into visual artworks.

This experience gave rise to the Artistic-Social Calligram, a practice developed through artworks, performances, and installations, predominantly created with pen and ink. Among her most significant projects are La Voce dei 2000, Voci dalla Quarantena, the performances of L’Urlo di Penelope in the garden of the MAXXI Museum in Rome, Who’s Your Enemy (Düsseldorf, 2023), created in collaboration with artist Vera Vorneweg, and the collective work Migliaia di persone come una for the University of Bologna (2023), now part of the university’s permanent exhibition.

She has also created word portraits dedicated to Peppino and Felicia Impastato, exhibited at Casa Memoria Felicia e Peppino Impastato in Cinisi, as well as a portrait created in collaboration with the InOltre association as part of the campaign for the release of Patrick Zaki.

Her painting practice encompasses watercolor, oil, and mixed media and develops through the relationship between gesture, listening, and perception. Her work translates sound into pictorial matter while exploring, among other themes, the fragility of the human figure.

In 2024, she made her debut as an author with the publication of the illustrated story Vietato ai poeti guardare la luna (Poets Are Forbidden to Look at the Moon), published by Splēn Edizioni, in which the artistic calligram enters into dialogue with narrative.

Since 2025, her research has expanded further into color and sound, bringing the calligram into an increasingly performative and synesthetic dimension, in which writing, painting, and music converge within a single expressive space.