Empa|thy

The 23-year-old Barbara Rossaro wanted to shed light on the delicate topic of empathy, choosing it for her bachelor thesis at the Faculty of Design and Art. “The idea is to show in a visual way an intangible phenomenon”, the former student from Preore (in Trentino) explains. “Highly empathic people tend to embrace the emotions of people around them, making them their own. This creates discomfort because the person involved experiences conflicting emotions without being able to identify the cause.” The materials in the project are broken wine glasses and blown sugar used to represent different human interactions. The sugar’s task is to fill in the missing parts of the broken glass, repairing it in a unique way, representing metaphorically the consequences of different empathic interactions (Thesis project with prof. Nitzan Cohen and Alvise Mattozzi).