FLAVIA BERTORELLO Argentinian-born-Queens-based artist, architect, and educator exploring the body-environment relations through a research-based practice that includes drawing, writing, and experimenting with materials in various formats, scales, and spatial contexts. Interested in site-responsive processes, Bertorello’s work exists at the intersection of drawing, sculpture, printed media, restoration and installation.
CURRENT STATEMENT /2025
My practice is rooted in observation, site-responsive research, and material experimentation. I engage with land and place as living systems—shaped by geology, human intervention, memory, and time. Working across registers— historical, scientific and poetic. I’m guided by ways of knowing rooted in lived experience. I draw inspiration from pre-industrial forms of knowledge—when to live was to observe, to build, to imagine, without rigid separations between disciplines. This ethos guides my approach: intuitive yet research-driven, always questioning how perception is shaped by context.
Drawing plays a central role in my practice—not only as a form of visual communication, but also as a tool for research. It opens a reflexive space that is both conceptual and perceptual. In this space, I hold room for intimacy, relationship, and transformation—attuned to what is fragile, tentative, and in flux. The process is very dynamic, shaping what I observe and how I observe. Through this ongoing exchange, mark-making becomes both generative and reflective: shaping perception, giving form to thought, and creating space for imagination to unfold. As Paul Crowther writes, while a photograph captures an “arrested moment of something’s visual existence,” a drawing “embodies the moment by being physically made.” It is both the act and the artifact: the witness and the witnessed, the trace and the event.
I am particularly interested in the porous boundaries between the natural and the fabricated. In recent work, I’ve investigated urban soils as repositories of memory—examining how cities metabolize time and how the ground itself holds a record of human activity. My current research at Genspace involves extracting and amplifying bacterial DNA from New York City soil, specifically across three parks along the original terminal moraine, to further understand the genomic structures that shape and sustain our shared environment.
Education
2018-2019- Transart Institute for Creative Research, University of Plymouth, UK. MFA.
2014-2018- The Art Students League of New York. Sculpture & Painting.
1997-2006- National University of Cordoba, Argentina. M.Arch & Urban Design.
Publications
2025- Ooze- Made Land- Artist Book-Self published
2023- NYLAAT program overview, New York Latin American Triennale
2023- Body as Land- Artist Book-Self published
2022- Shape of Nature- Jewelry Book-China Humanities Publishing House
2020- Growth & Evolution-Jewelry Book- China Modern Publishing House
Art Residencies
2025- Genspace NYC. Brooklyn, New York.
2024- Swale House/ Urban Soil Institute. Governor’s Island, New York.
2023- New York Latin American Art Triennial. Governor’s Island, New York.
2021- Untethered Magic. Nairobi, Kenya.
2019- Field Kitchen Academy. Wüsten Buchholz, Germany.
2019- Transart, UferStudios. Berlin, Germany.
2019- Transart, Art in general. Brooklyn, New York.
2018- Transart, UferStudios. Berlin, Germany.
Group Exhibits
Upcoming 2025-“BEYOND THE ARTIFACT: Do we call it architecture or a system of contingencies?”/ group exhibit. New York Latin American Art Triennial. NYC
2024-“Ipaint flowers so they won’t die”/ wearable art/ group exhibit. Rome, Italy
2023-“Ooze”/ installation/ group exhibit. Governors Island, NYC
2023-“This jewelry is 100mrb”/wearable art/ group exhibit. Beijing, China.
2022- “I break”Venice experimental video and performing arts festival/Pallazo Bembo, Venice,Italy.
2021- “eternal flame” / video/ group exhibition / V Gallery, NYC
2020- “the heart cave” / sound piece/ online symposium/ transart reading room
2020- “Coil of life”/ wearable art/ group exhibit. Beijing design week. China.
2020- “This Happened”/ installation/ citadel + compagnie. Toronto, Canada.
2019- “Iron and Granite: IN Conversation”/ performance & installation/ Uferstudios, Berlin. Germany.
2019- “Particle lake”/ sculpture & sound installation- live stream/ New York-Cordoba, Argentina
2017- Elizabeth st. Garden Fundraising show/ poetry piece/ NY, NY
2017- “Red dot exhibition”- Sculpture- Phyllis Harriman Mason gallery, NY, NY
2016- “Red dot exhibition”- Sculpture- Phyllis Harriman Mason gallery, NY, NY
2015- “Red dot exhibition”- Sculpture- Phyllis Harriman Mason gallery, NY, NY
2010-“Nuage” - The Lab gallery/ installation / NY, NY
flabertorello@gmail.com
+1 646-852-7305