INTERTWINED: Interview with Flora Cabili

NOTE: These interviews have been edited for clarity and length. Interview conducted and edited by FreeQuency, Photos by danielle miles. Intertwined was on view at Antenna:3718 from June 14th-July 28th, 2025. You can view a virtual tour of ⫘⫘ ✺ 𝐼𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓉𝓌𝒾𝓃𝑒𝒹 ✺ ⫘⫘ on Antenna’s website and purchase a copy of the accompanying exhibition publication at Antenna’s online bookstore.

The week before ⫘⫘ ✺ 𝐼𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓉𝓌𝒾𝓃𝑒𝒹 ✺ ⫘⫘ opened at Antenna:3718, I sat down with Antenna Collective member Flora Cabili to learn more about her upcoming exhibition. Flora Cabili is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist, educator, and queer storyteller who uses public engagement, installations, movement, and mixed-media works to explore themes of origin, assembly and dislocation. Through this exploration, they grapple with how we can collectively (re)consider the nature of materials, manipulate nature and contemplate notions of space, permanence, and extraction. Flora is an Antenna Collective member who has completed residencies at Aquarium Gallery and DEPART-MENT in New Orleans, Obracadobra in Oaxaca city, RUBBERBAND in Montreal, Mime training at École Internationale de Mime Corporel Dramatique and will attend Studio Works in Eastport, Maine in September 2025. She has exhibited in New Orleans at Aquarium Gallery, Antenna Gallery, The Front Gallery, Luna Fete, and the Contemporary Arts Center. This is Flora’s first solo show at Antenna Gallery. Flora was born in Lyon, France, raised in France/US, and has lived in New Orleans for ten years where she works as an artist, educator, and a facilitator.

FreeQuency: I’m going to read the exhibition description to you and want to know your thoughts as you near completion.

~⫘⫘ ✺ 𝐼𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓉𝓌𝒾𝓃𝑒𝒹 ✺ ⫘⫘ is an immersive, mixed media exhibition that reflects on space, carving, permanence, and expansion. The paintings, collages, sculptures, videoed movement story, and soundscape are entangled in metaphysical environments that are both confined and liberated. In the meandering journey of patterns, where do things end and begin? This pattern vocabulary is rooted in past work contemplating the nature and composition of material, specifically non-disposable petroleum byproduct materials like Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) foam. EPS’s foam air-filled balls compacted together emulate our most basic human parts — cells, DNA strands, organs — and nature. 𝐼𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓉𝓌𝒾𝓃𝑒𝒹 invites us to consider how we experience these patterns, at times entangled, to find the release in the spaces in between. The soundscape is a collaboration between Jeremy Phipps , Sophia Scarano , and Flora Cabili. ~

Flora: OK, I still stand by that, it does track [laughter]. It’s such a mouthful! I’ll start with the petroleum by-product material. I attended the DEPART-MENT Residency at The Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design in 2022 where I did a material study of EPS foam (what we call styrofoam) to look at its impact on a larger scale and understand this incredibly fabricated material through the lens of the natural environment. It was by accident and curiosity I ended up deep diving.

At DEPART-MENT, through this material study that included community workshops, research, and endless art making, I took a microscope to see what EPS foam is made up of and thought “this looks like cells”! It led to this mini existential crisis thinking about how [styrofoam] is reproducing the most basic ways that we are, that nature is, in such a fabricated way.

Although I’m curious about EPS foam and it’s informed my approach, I’m not a styrofoam artist, it’s just a material I have used and also leaned on to understand more about what intrigues me about cellular, organic dreamscapes and metaphysical environments. I am interested in deriving these patterns and transposing organic patterns on materials. If you look at 𝐼𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓉𝓌𝒾𝓃𝑒𝒹, there is no EPS foam in the work and if you were to compare the exhibited work with [my previous  EPS foam light sculptures] you’d say, “there are derivatives and parts of the patterns are the same.” There is cohesion.

For instance, this strand…

…it was this seed-like shape I began carving in styrofoam at DEPART-MENT. It’s originally my version of DNA helix, which I diluted and simplified over time. Ultimately, I became dedicated to materializing this strand outside of its environment. For the last Antenna Collective exhibition “UPCYCLING: The Creative ReUse of Waste Materials”, I decided to make a hanging sculpture of the most organic material, paper. Almost like it was now existing in its opposite material. This ultramarine sculpture is made out of chicken wire, paper pulp, gesso, and acrylic, a hanging, resolved knot or portal with no beginning or end. It brings me peace when I look at it.

The pieces that are in 𝐼𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓉𝓌𝒾𝓃𝑒𝒹 feature pattern stories throughout that allow the viewers to go in this journey with the pattern. They will be haunted in the way they need to or feel a release in the way they need to. You will see what you need to see in it. 

FreeQuency: You’re newer to exhibiting. How do you think that that’s a strength as you’re putting 𝐼𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓉𝓌𝒾𝓃𝑒𝒹 together?

Flora: I’m deeply experimental and curious, and that doesn’t guarantee things going well, but I’m a good problem solver. In the past, I have done installations, mostly outdoors, that have revolved around one main piece. “𝐼𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓉𝓌𝒾𝓃𝑒𝒹” is a product of a storytelling vision I have been yearning to share, a disciplined studio practice, mentorship from fellow artists, and my intuition. I love when Doechii says “I love when my ideas flow when I’m not scared”. That’s what I’m trying to channel. 

FreeQuency: Tell me about pieces in the exhibition, and the process you’ve been going through that brought you to the theme of 𝐼𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓉𝓌𝒾𝓃𝑒𝒹.

Flora: There are 2D and 3D sculptural pieces, a video, [mixed media collages I make with my ink work], a looping soundscape, oil paintings, and some written offerings placed on the altar. There’s a through line in the color story, patterns, symbols, and textures and you’ll see throughout. Then, there’s a literal pattern story that links all the pieces.

I am guided to use the mediums that best convey my ideas so it was crucial to figure out how to marry them together meaningfully. The looping soundscape is heard throughout, unifying the pieces, the story. 

I’m primarily interested in making environments. I like thinking about space and bringing all the pieces together. I’m curious about different mediums and having them fit together and intertwine stories. I get lost in the story of the show, of an environment, of a space, of an experience, and granted, the story doesn’t necessarily need to matter to other people, but for me it needs to resonate. 

FreeQuency: how are you seeing the difference between creating an exhibition and putting together an environment? 

Flora: You can step into an environment and deeply feel. It is contained and transports you simultaneously. An environment engages the senses and is multidisciplinary. I’m a physical person, and there’s so much of my art practice that ends up being me moving, literally, through a piece before, during or after I make it. In putting together “𝐼𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓉𝓌𝒾𝓃𝑒𝒹”, I thought: what are people going to see, read, what are they going to touch? There are written offerings placed on the altar that gave the show a whole other dimension. And granted, there is limited touching, but – I think it might be informed in part by my background as a special education elementary school teacher. All the students [I’ve worked with] had different exceptionalities where you just have to be super creative. Like…we’re making a visual, plus you’re hearing a sound, plus you’re also experiencing this…so in order to “experience” something, you can actually do it in multiple, different ways, rather than just having it one way. I think it makes so much sense, because when you’re immersed, you’re able to understand the concepts more clearly…

FreeQuency: or in different ways…

Flora: totally

FreeQuency: When people go through the exhibition, what do you want them to experience or leave with? What was the urgency of this exhibition in this current moment for you?

Can you tell that I am too analytical? I’m told that this is a typical Virgo trait. I’m excited to continue moving towards more immersive, multidisciplinary experimental spaces. Stay tuned.