“What happens now?” “Now? You go home.” “Home?”
From thesis to object: shaping Cécile di Giovanni’s ‘Inhabited Fictions.’
“Cécile di Giovanni’s practice explores how fragments of North American popular culture — spanning media narratives, historical events, fictional spaces, and mass-produced objects — can serve as symbolic materials for reshaping personal and collective memory.” This is how the artist introduces herself on her website.
Over the past year, we’ve been in ongoing dialogue with Cécile, working together to help her reflect on and define her artistic practice. Initially, this took the form of an open-ended A–Z, a non-raisonné catalogue of thoughts, references, and visual material drawn from her work. But when Cécile began writing a thesis as part of her academic journey, the process naturally expanded, and we saw an opportunity to help give shape to it. What emerged, Inhabited Fictions., has become much more than a degree requirement, forming a theoretical base to reflect on the past while opening toward the future.
By returning to the cultural imprints she absorbed in childhood and carried into adulthood, Cécile opens a space to question the very foundations of her identity, not only as an artist, but also as a girl and a woman, summoning the ambiguous tensions between masculine and feminine (understood as our inner poles), and — perhaps more importantly — social and self-protective masks, the quiet magic of concealment and transformation, and the enduring role of idols, chimeras, and myths in shaping who we become.
The path the artist thus follows, travelling upstream as if in her own time machine, is deeply rooted in therapeutic work and in listening attentively to the inner child.
“We feel ourselves at home in the world of cinema because it represents such an unequivocally illusionary world, defamiliarizing our everyday reality by using the image repertoire of familiar fairy-tale and adventures stories. In so doing, this illusory world offers us precisely the sense of belonging that we seek to negotiate through notions like home.” — Elizabeth Bronfen, Home in Hollywood (2004)
One might be tempted to think that this terrain (the popular culture of 1990s and 2000s America) has been exhausted, examined, theorized, and deconstructed to the point of saturation. Yet through Cécile’s research, it becomes clear that it continues to resonate, particularly in the ways the present alienates us through an ever-intensifying hyperreality (as theorized by Jean Baudrillard), and through the proliferation of increasingly specific subcultures across the globe and the lived experience of the Internet. It is as if the VHS, collectible-based, fan culture of the pre-Internet era had already prefigured what has now reached an absurd extreme, where it has become almost impossible to distinguish storylines from reality.
Cécile’s practice has grown from a deep understanding of how ambiguity and lack can activate the viewer’s gaze. In her installations and images, there is always a complexity that resists being reduced to a mere exercise in citation. These works firmly belong to our present moment, unsettling us through their infinitude; their fragmentary nature and the illusionary, set-like worlds they suggest resonate with the very character of today’s media and the circulation of misinformation. Yet it is also in the physical realm — in contrast to today’s immaterial hegemony — that the artist reactivates the souvenir, and with it a connection to something deeper. As Cécile says and quotes, rereading Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt today: “For an immigrant like my aunt, America is not the images on a TV, it basically is the TV, which is why she decorates it with paper doilies, vanilla incense sticks, and stuffed Garfields.” And again: “America is basically not a place or even an image, but furniture.” She recognises in this exactly what she felt as a child: America, more than a place, was a set of furniture, objects, and domestic arrangements that brought to life the stories she was absorbing.
Cécile invites us to ask what is real, to confront our own memories, and to engage with the symbols of a shared culture that once sought to confine us. In doing so, she may loosen its grip — if only slightly — while reawakening the dreamscape and the American magic she deliberately keeps alive. Here, the so-called soft power takes on another meaning entirely: a (counter)power that is soft (let’s say fluid or infused), yet steadily shaping both the gradual construction and the eventual deconstruction of the individual.
As for the thesis, it took shape not only as a body of research but also as a printed object — a hybrid between artist’s book and critical journal. Conceived as an extension of Cécile’s visual and narrative vocabulary, it weaves together texts, images, and archival fragments in a sequence that reflects the layered nature of her thinking. Inspired by the press kits popular in the US in the late 1990s and early 2000s to promote Hollywood blockbusters, the work is presented in two separate volumes (basically, text vs. graphics 👽), housed within a soft, glossy-coated cardboard sleeve.
The title Inhabited Fictions. takes as its emblem the house from the Home Alone logo — a defining reference in Cécile’s work that resonates naturally with her own search. The dream unfolds in the “celestial” allover print covering the sleeve, placing us squarely in the realm of the American dream at its most dazzling — space exploration, the pull of the unknown, and the longing for connection beyond Earth, evoking Robert Zemeckis’s Contact (1997).
In the left pocket, color images of Cécile’s work are printed on semi-matte coated paper, mirroring the written thesis in the right pocket. Set in a typewriter font and printed in black and white on 80gsm uncoated stock, these pages recall the look and feel of a film script. The two sets are placed in deliberate dialogue, with the artist’s business card — digitally hot-foiled in silver — tucked into the right flap. Ultimately, this object serves as both vessel and home for the artist’s future explorations, a tool designed to ground as well as travel, to synthesize as well as carry and defend Cécile’s practice.
Inhabited Fictions. is therefore both a work of critical thought and an object of desire — one that encapsulates Cécile di Giovanni’s method of weaving together personal mythologies, popular imagery, and reflective inquiry. It stands as a tangible marker of an ongoing dialogue, and as a reminder that research, when embodied, can be as evocative and enduring as the images and stories it seeks to question.
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