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Greetings from Sweden, from Val Giamo.
My long-term artistic project IN CONVERSATION WITH MARCUS takes the form of an ongoing dialogue with a fictional figure named Marcus.
Marcus functions as a double, observer, and archival device - a constructed presence through which questions of memory, absence, time, and solitude are examined.
The project operates across painting, photography, text, music, sound installation, and film, with each medium acting as a trace of what resists documentation.
Marcus exists in the space between fiction and reality, echoing Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra. Through this figure, personal experience intersects with collective memory, survival, and projection.
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My practice is informed by artists and thinkers whose presence is embedded in the project’s material and conceptual language.
From Alberto Burri, I inherit a trust in materiality - surfaces marked by damage, repair, and physical truth.
Anselm Kiefer informs my understanding of memory and history as weight, scale, and matter.
Arvo Pärt’s influence appears in the project’s sonic restraint, where minimal sound carries emotional and spiritual density.
Sophie Calle shapes the investigative use of intimacy, absence, and personal narrative as methodology.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinema informs my treatment of time as a primary material.
Francesca Woodman’s work resonates in the use of the body and self-image as sites of both presence and disappearance.
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These influences are not referenced illustratively but absorbed structurally - shaping how Marcus functions as a lens through which the unseen, the unrecorded, and the fragile are made perceptible.
Val: Loneliness feels endless.
Marcus: That’s because it bends time.
Val: Into what?
Marcus: Into a mirror, so you see yourself.
Marcus: Do you remember it exactly?
Val: I don’t remember - I feel it.
Marcus: Then maybe it never really happened?
Val: Then why does it still hurt?
​Val Giamo
I stitch silence into fabric and wood, driven by a hunger to make the unseen tangible.
Val Giamo is a multidisciplinary artist, photographer, composer, and pianist based in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Her music has been released by Deutsche Grammophon / Universal Music Group, van Drumpt, and Berlin baised label Leiter.
Val's visual works are held in private collections across Sweden, Germany, Bulgaria, and Greece.
She has also signed with a booking agency and will embark on a piano tour in Portugal in March 2026.
Her exhibitions have been presented in Sweden, Italy, Australia, and Greece.
Val's solo exhibition took place in an Architectural Studio T5 in the center of Gothenburg December 2025.
Where depth can breathe.It is all about a quiet chronicle - an attempt to preserve what memory cannot hold.
A diary where image, sound, and word converge to grasp the fleeting, the fragile, the deeply felt.
I would be happy to hear from you and would gladly come to speak about the project in person.
Thank you for your attention and time.
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Best regards,
Val Giamo