AT: Where are you from and how/why did you start engaging with art?

SK: I was born in Milan. I started engaging with art when I was a kid through my mother, she’s an artist too.

AT: When did it become serious?

SK: I’ve always thought of art as something related to freedom, so I wanted to follow this path since the beginning.

AT: Are there any person who has been significant in your breakthrough as an artist?

SK: Alberto Garutti and Cino Zucchi, some teachers I met that have been deeply inspiring.

AT: What is your first approach to the work? How would you describe your practice?

SK: I develop ideas through research, by writing and experimenting on raw material, to disclose further physical and narrative possibilities. I like to work on the circumstances of things to understand their nature, their ‘intelligence’, stressing them with language. I try to guide without touching.

AT: What do you aim to reach with your work?

SK: I want to reach a primary dimension, wild, foreign to me. I aim to create simple entities.

AT: What are your favourite tools and materials for working?

SK: I like all kind of materials, either raw or processed, in particular ephemeral ones, that need care and are susceptible to change. I like to work with living forces that I find in space and time, mostly invisible ones.

AT: What do you feel while you work? Do you usually think about the final outcome beforehand?

SK: It’s unpredictable for the most. I’m really open to changes and contradictions, so I follow what comes until things reach a moment of quietude. Then I let things settle a start collecting feedback.

AT: How do you understand that a work is finished?

SK: When I’m not there anymore

AT: Where does the inspiration for the work come from?

SK: Life forms, technology, the transformation of matter; the threshold between wilderness and synthetic environments.

AT: Are there any artists who influenced your works? Why?

SK: Lucio Fontana, Isamu Noguchi, Gregor Schneider, for their approach to space; Eva Hesse for her approach to materials; Luigi Ghirri, Matthew Barney, Pierre Huyghe, for their visions; Gino De Dominicis for the magical irony.

AT: How important is the role of social media for you?

SK: They’re useful tools for updates and for sharing vision, travelling distances from wherever. Sometimes though I like to be disconnected.

AT: What is your opinion about NFTs and their impact on the art world?

SK: I think they’ve got amazing potential, not only in terms of content. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of computers becoming individuals.

AT: As an artist, what is your point of view about the contemporary art system?

SK: It’s a layered system that involves many actors, offering many opportunities. I believe that the priority should always be the quality of works and thoughts, and sometimes it is.

AT: What do you find to be the most challenging or daunting thing about pursuing art? What is the most rewarding part of working as an artist?

SK: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

AT: What do you do besides art?

SK: I spend time with my daughter, we play and walk around making stories, looking for creatures to become friends with.

AT: What are your goals and expectations for the future?

SK: Transformation.

Sacha Kanah (b. 1981) is an Italian visual artist currently living and working in Milan, Italy.

The work addresses spatial and material relationships to language, through sculptures and installations. Forms materialize in response to the premises of a given medium and contextual conditions, offering open dialogue. Interactions and co-evolutions are related to corporeal life and material phenomena, including the inorganic world, technologies, and nonhuman organisms and processes.

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