This book offers the first comprehensive overview of Anna Franceschini's practice. Organized around recurring themes, it explores animation, the body, machines, ghosts, desire, and windows through commissioned contributions and selected writings. Its associative structure reflects her interest in repetition, transformation, and unstable images.
Machines Wear Costumes is Anna Franceschini's first monograph, bringing together works made between 2007 and 2025. Rather than a chronological account, the publication offers an in-depth look at the artist's oeuvre through a specialized lexicon.
This glossary is organized around six core entries—Animation, Body, Machine, Ghost, Desire, and Window—which are further articulated in subentries that refine their meaning in relation to the artist's work. Newly commissioned texts by Mohamed Almusibli, Attilia Fattori Franchini, Ilaria Gianni, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Jeppe Ugelvig, and Marianna Vecellio are expanded by a constellation of quotations from previously published texts to offer a composite yet coherent interpretation.
Indebted in structure to Walter Benjamin's Das Passagen‑Werk, and in visual approach to Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, the book favors juxtaposition and recurrence over linear narrative, mirroring Franceschini's own practice of repetition, rotation, and animation. By resisting a fixed reading order, the volume invites an open and recursive engagement, functioning as a "desiring machine," activated anew through each act of looking and reading.
Anna Franceschini (born in 1979 in Pavia) is an Italian artist, experimental filmmaker, and video artist working in a wide variety of media, including film, performance, kinetic sculpture, and photocopy.
In her practice, Franceschini explores the multiple ways of displaying commodities. Underlying her observation of reality is cinema through its constituent elements: movement, light, framing, and editing. Performances, Xerox copies, kinetic sculptures, "bachelor(ette) machines"—which inject femininity into the Duchampian idea of apparatus—are, for the artist, "a cinema by other means." Reversing the ends of the discussion about "cinema as machine," she redirects the gaze toward the hypothesis of a "machine as cinema." By creating sculptures intended as moving images, she turns commodities into quasi-living beings: devices whose subjectivity emerges only within a mise-en-scène.
Edited by Attilia Fattori Franchini, Anna Franceschini, Ilaria Gianni.
Texts by Chiara Agradi, Mohamed Almusibli, Fabio Cherstich, Liv Cuniberti, Gioia Dal Molin, Bernardo De Souza, Vincenzo di Rosa, Attilia Fattori Franchini, Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Ilaria Gianni, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Beniamino Marini, Nick Mauss, Giacomo Mercuriali, Alice Motard, Tabea Panizzi, Tobias Perse, Jennifer Teets, Roberta Tenconi, Jeppe Ugelvig, Joel Valabrega, Marianna Vecellio.
