Ilaria Sansotta

Ilaria Sansotta is a bookseller and visual artist. She is the founder of the second-hand bookstore LaDolceVita in Barcelona. Coming from the world of book restoration in Italy, she has always experimented with the creative possibilities of paper and related materials. She has participated in Art Libris 2021 and 2022 (Barcelona), Rocart 2021, the Art and Culture Festival (Peñíscola), Drap-Art’21 (Barcelona), the Artist Book Festival 2022, and the La Bóbila Cultural Center (Hospitalet).

Ilaria Sansotta’s works are an invitation to reflect on the delicate balance of Nature, which needs us to be preserved. At the same time, the use of the open book symbolizes the creative process, the birth, and development of ideas. The artwork she presents is like a flower inside a glass jar. The flower has been made by cutting a book: the leaves of the flower are formed by folding leather covers, and the petals of the flower are the same open pages of the book. By opening a book, a flower is born, a story, a life. The earth and its mineral nutrients are also present in the bottle, as well as the sun’s rays, which descend like filaments from the cork of the jar.

“Nature is the elemental force of the world, sacred and eternally creative, which generates and actively produces all things from itself.” — Alexander von Humboldt (Pioneer of ecological thought and one of the first to write about climate change).