Valentina Sartori
is a painter whose practice is participatory. She grew up on the cultural and physical borders between Italy and Austria and earned degrees in Decoration and Art Pedagogy in Italy and Spain. In 2005 she moved to Berlin to complete an MA Art in Context at the University of Art of Berlin. In 2013, her experience of having two children led her to develop a format of collective painting, “FAMILIENPORTRAET”. For this work she outlines her own and other families, friends and groups of people on walls or large pieces of paper, they fill in the rest. She has carried out the project in many refugee shelters across Berlin. The life-size portraits set up an opportunity to represent and reimagine oneself and a diffuse sense of belonging through a visual medium that requires no language.