Interview
Meet Valeria Carrieri
Valeria Carrieri, a literature PhD as well as an artist, draws much of her inspiration from myth and narrative representations of feminine figures. In particular, she examines how mythology normalises violence by aestheticising it — disguising it through ideals of beauty and poetry. This is where her art residency in Salemi begins: with Niobe, a mythological woman whose grief, after the gods kill her children, turns her into a rock from which a spring of tears flows forever.
Artist background
Valeria is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher from Rome, who works with drawing, monoprint, painting, sculpture, embroidery, and texts.
"In my practice, I merge autobiographical narratives with theoretical speculation, and a deep interest in mythologies and popular arts and crafts," Valeria shares.
Ceramics came later, through an unexpected invitation to create a papier-mâché self-portrait for an exhibition.
"It was a short step to ceramics from there," she says.
The work
Of all her pieces, one stands apart. Naiade (2023) is a sculpture she "cannot separate from", and a work that marked a before and after in her practice.
"It continues to surprise me and, in part, elude me, as if it had a life of its own," she shares.
Her craziest work, though, came during Milan Art Week 2025 at Galleria Studiolo, where she created a charcoal wall-drawing, Dafne Suite, and a large mural painting, Note per il Diluvio (Notes for the Flood). Both site-specific, large-scale, created fast, and both covered up at the end of the show.
"They had a short-lived existence, which is a little sad but also powerful and liberating."
Mythology, silence, and transformation
Much of Valeria's work circles around female figures from ancient Mediterranean myth, particularly those forced to transform. In Ovid's tales, both Daphne and Niobe defy a male deity and are punished: one becomes a laurel tree, the other a weeping stone.
"I want to bring to light and problematize the violent content of these narratives and, at the same time, explore their imaginative potential," she says. "What might it be like for a human being to become a plant or a mineral beyond the silencing and punishment conveyed by ancient myth?"
This connects to what she calls the "aesthetisation of silence":
"The desire for appropriation of feminised bodies is a constant in the tradition of Western Art. Nymphs of the Greco-Roman traditions, for example, are often feminized and eroticized. If they resist sexual advances or do not behave as expected of them, they incur punishments that silence their voice."
Art residency in Salemi
In Salemi, Valeria will focus on the Niobe story:
"I would like to deepen the link between pain, the metaphor of petrification and the act of weeping through a series of sculptures and water/tears containers."