Materials Lab

In 2015 artist Fernanda Fragateiro presented a series of plywood boxes containing research material to students of Anthropology at the Harvard Art Museums. The materials offered the audience an opportunity to explore the artist’s practice through a collection of objects as an alternative to documentary photographs of completed works. This event was the beginning of the artist’s seminal work Materials Lab.

Materials Lab sits between sculpture, installation, documentation and research. Material Lab is a landscape’ of materials such as silk threads, books, book segments, exhibition catalogues, models, text fragments, magazine pages, inkjet prints, notes, drawings, marble, steel, bricks, dirt, dust and fragments of artworks drawn from the artist’s personal archive. Documenting the work in detail, this book demonstrates how Materials Lab is a navigation tool for probing the social and political history of modernism, the practices of the artist’s own work and how looking at the ‘cracks’ between ‘accepted’ knowledge is essential for a progressive future.

Introduction by Jonathan Casciani
Essays and interviews by Claudio Zecchi, Alfredo Puente and David Barro