The roots: collage

Collage is central to E. Lotti Astolfi’s practice—not only as a visual technique, but as a method of collecting, fragmenting, and recombining traces of sound, text, and material. This process resembles the investigation of a crime scene in a disappearing world, where each layer—concrete, sound, or discarded object—holds clues to history and memory. By exposing these strata, Astolfi draws parallels to geology and archaeology, using material transformation as a metaphor for personal and collective becoming.

The artist’s ever-growing archives—clippings, posters, flyers, books, and her own photography—form a multi-faceted, obsessive accumulation of image cut-ups, reflecting the darkness of contemporary times. Through this work, Astolfi elaborates both the external world and her inner landscape: the building of identity, the queer body, existential angst. She refers to these archives as her World Observatory—a visionary stream of information that overflows and reverberates into every aspect of her work.