Giada La Gala

Giada la Gala, it could be a made-up name, it sounds so beautiful, but that’s actually how she was named at birth.

Giada grew up in the warm south of Italy. Since her childhood she has felt a need to question, create and explore. After high school she left the south to explore the world, ending up first in the north of Italy. She enrolled in the physics program at the University and alongside worked with independent collectives and networks.

Kronstadt was an independent journal/fanzine driven by the need to reclaim ownership to information, in a neoliberalist country literally governed through TVs. Fatti spazio was a collective reclaiming spaces and building commons.

2014
In 2014 she came to Utrecht for 5 months through a student exchange program, which eventually led her to a PhD in Amsterdam. In 2020, Giada received her PhD with her dissertation 'Glancing at Tiny Vibrations'.

During her college years, Giada's involvement in the independent movement grew in the direction of artivism. The world of science which shapes society, dominated by privileged white men in the new technocratic era constitutes a drive to question and build alternatives.

Communities

Giada found a fertile social, political, and artistic playground in independent communities, inspired by the mutual exchange of ideas, plans and actions. A certain anarchism went hand in hand with strong mutual connections. Among all those free spirits, Giada found space to breathe and let her own spirit run free, while at the same time cultivating an academic position thanks to the emotional shelter her community involvement offered from capitalism.

ADM
Due to the large international community network, Giada ended up at ADM in Amsterdam, then still in the western port area. While working on her PhD, she found herself inspired by the Electric Circus and other artists which beautifully combined technology and freedom in ADM, reappropriating science to make art.

Art practice in development
After her PhD and a year Postdoc, after 2 years of travels, Giada came back to Amsterdam and decided to start an internal exploration. She is now enrolled in the Artificial Times Master program at Sandberg Institute. There she is building a practice that wants to join back together the fragments of her past endeavors and what she has learned about the world philosophically, politically, and socially. Finding psychological relief pockets in the engagement with materials such as ceramics, glass, metal which she combines with electronics and light, performance art and sound tending to collective experimentations.

Giada has now found her place at Het Groene Veld, ADM Noord. Together with her boyfriend she rents a studio where she connects science, art and activism, experimenting with materials, shapes and formulas. She also teaches Science Communication at the UvA. She would like to take root here at Het Groene Veld, where with a group she is starting the development of a new art and performance space.