At the Villa Datris foundation, Raja hosted SCULPTRICES, an exhibition exploring female sculpture.

The Italian sculptor Elisabetta Casella was present.

I interview Elisabetta in the cottage-workshop where she lives.

Our chat is framed by her 20 cats and her art: the paintings, the sculptures, but also the taped chairs, the deep blue wooden breakfast table, the white lacework drawers, the bleached door planks.

1) How did you get to Villa Datris?

I had exhibited some of my works in the cellars of Rivalta Castle, on the occasion of the Rajapack company convention. I had come home unsatisfied. I had brought wrong, small works, which were lost in the huge halls of the fortress, no one would have noticed them.

But in the middle of the night I received first a text message and then a call, directly from Danièle Kapel: she wanted a closer look at all my works.

This woman, whom I did not yet know, had immediately struck me. She had known how to look. She had stopped. She had grasped the details.

The next day I was able to show about thirty of my works in the clean surroundings of a gallery, in Pavia, and I was asked to exhibit at Villa Datris.

In the art world today, public relations are very important, I didn’t expect that chance encounters could still exist; instead I found Danièle, an honest, correct person, she surprised me.

2) What did Villa Datris mean to you?

Often at openings the focus is more on the glass of wine than on the work of art.

At Villa Datris, on the other hand, I found a sincere artistic ferment, a reflection on the works that was respectful of the artist’s work. A place beyond superficiality.

I was thrilled to find such a concentration of female sculptors of such a high level, a rarity in the art of large, mostly male figures.

I was excited, I feared that my work would not hold a candle to the …

Did they hold up?

They have held up. I exchanged contacts with several artists, e.g. with Apollonio of Padua and the photographer who accompanied her .

I am grateful to Danièle, for the way she allowed me to get to this exhibition, but also to the Datris Foundation, for its impeccable organisation.

3) We as the Raja group constantly strive for recycling. In Maurizio Meschia’s poem for you, evocative landscape bandages appear, what materials do you use for your works?

My works are stratifications. From materials come suggestions. For example, one of my first spheres came from a polystyrene ball discarded by a company. The nails in my works come from wooden pallets, the iron wires and plastic from company landfills. Mine is total recycling; many entrepreneurs let me rummage through their discards. They gladly give me some of their time because I offer them, for a few moments, a singular view of the world.

Iapproach material stratification with awareness, with rigour.

In the beginning there is randomness, or an episode. I started wrapping the balls out of anger, when the health bureaucracy was taking away my nearest and dearest, but then I tamed them through my hands and head.

While I was wrapping them I already had a precise icon in mind.

I am jealous of the layering of history in objects. I collect everything. There are the pieces of history of loved ones: my grandmother’s mass veil or Paolo’s (the partner who recently passed away from a rare disease) T-shirt, which I have now layered into the work ‘Arrivederci’ (Goodbye). There are the backs of old wardrobes landed and thrown away, to which I reserve a glorious end: they become my canvases.

I don’t use rubbers and I don’t clean the canvases, at most I apply a light coat of white that lets the story show through.

I love imperfections.

4) Would you use some of the cartoons we discard in the future?

Right now I am totally focused on ceramics, but my research never stops. Why not?