Une ressource audio authentique : l’interview de Bianca Bondi

Bianca Bondi est une artiste sud-africaine, née à Johannesburg en 1986, installée à Paris. Son travail implique l’activation ou l’élévation d’objets banals grâce à l’utilisation de réactions chimiques, le plus souvent par l’eau salée. Sa pratique oscille entre l’art écologique, l’alchimie et la magie. Dans le cadre du festival Normandie Impressionniste, elle a présenté l’exposition Milk of Amnesia au centre régional d’art contemporain Le Portique, au Havre (13 avril au 9 juin 2024). L’interview a été réalisée au Havre en avril 2024.

L’interview étant riche et les propos développés, les parties en gras peuvent être extraites du document et utilisées comme « citations » en fonction du niveau des élèves et des objectifs visés. La ressource a pour vocation à faire l’objet d’une compréhension orale.

[1] Can you introduce yourself and tell us how you became an artist ?

My name is Bianca Bondi, I was born in Johannesburg in South Africa. As you can tell from my last name I also have Italian heritage. I come from a family where my parents didn’t take me to museums or to galleries, they didn’t do this because their parents never did that with them so it just wasn’t a thing that we were used to.
So, for myself, you kind of realize that if you don’t have mentors or role models you don’t really you don’t see these careers as possibilities ; so for me it wasn’t possible to be an artist so I thought I love art I’m good at telling these art history stories maybe one day I should run an art institution or a museum.
And I really loved this idea because I thought well I’m a woman and that’s really great as a woman to do that so I applied for an art school in South Africa, and how I pitch it is I say that I believe that if you want to be someone who defends good art you need to know how to make good art so I was gonna to learn to make art before I run one of these places. Basically, fast forward, after seven years of study - I did two in South Africa -, I met a musician, fell in love…long distance relationship and he said you shouldn’t live in Paris with me and I told my parents well I’m moving to Paris, and so I end up here, and in my very last year, I have another epiphany and I think ’oh mince !’ maybe I want to be an artist because now I know that that’s possible and I really loved making art.

[2] What is your relationship with South Africa ?

I was born in Johannesburg, and I lived there actually till I was nineteen. So I do go back at least once a year, and I’ve tried to continue having a relationship with the country. But it’s hard when you start going back as a tourist, instead of really being integrated into the city life. I think the ways my birthplace comes out in my practice is you can definitely feel that it’s culturally rich. Every time I travel, I try to understand the culture more specifically in terms of spiritual practices…the culture where I’ll find myself, and see how in some way I can relate to that.
And I don’t know if it’s just because I was born in South Africa, but I think it’s also because I feel very ruthless in some way, because I’ve now lived in France for the same amount of time, if not more, than in my birth country. But actually, my father is Italian, and he never really spoke, because English wasn’t very good. So I grew up with this whole other identity, and I’m not French in France, no longer South African in South Africa, and I’m not Italian in Italy. So, you know, I just try and kind of figure…borrow pieces of wherever I go and see what kind of fits with me.
And South Africa is such an incredibly rich country. We have twelve official languages. Because since two years sign language is, sign language has been adopted, which tells you so much about the culture. It’s extremely open and progressive. And it’s a country dealing with a lot of backlash from the apartheid times. Then that takes, unfortunately, many, many years of undoing.
But to grow up in a third world country - even this term, is so problematic -, But to grow up in a country like that, you cannot not be aware of social injustices. And that definitely gives patina to every kind of work you create. You’re very much aware of the other and including…and it’s a general aura, and I’m so grateful to have grown up in a country where you have to be aware of all these other factors.

[3] Your pieces are mostly site-specific and linked to history, right ?

So the works that I created here, I did a few short trips to Le Havre, and so it was mainly about just reading about the history and trying to pick up something that I could relate to, a point of interest. And as previous, previously, I’d actually explored themes of diet and psychology, and how what we ingest affects how we are in the world - and I’d done a whole show around vanilla in Lyon - so I thought, you know, it seems like a natural way to continue this idea of, like, consumption, ingestion, the history of Le Havre, with spice.
And it was really interesting to see how you find your point of…your starting point, start reading, and then very quickly, things kind of lead you in a very different way. And when you’re developing a solo show, often it’s a year, a year and a half, two years in advance. And a lot of things happen in that space. And so I started with this idea of ingesting spices, ingesting foods. And then very quickly, it became about these pharmaceutical cabinets.
And when I was looking for these old cabinets, I realized that some of them you can’t really tell, do they go in the bathroom ? Did they go in the kitchen ? Are these for spices ? medicine ? Herbs ? And I really liked the way these lines were blurring. Some of them had these medical crosses, which became crucifixes. And then I thought, that’s quite interesting, because if you look at the history of this city, you have the war of religions, where Catholicism was kind of wiped out by the Protestants. So I thought that was quite interesting, to take these cabinets that I’d been burning, because I have a few works that have burnt wood. And here it just felt like I wanted to have this stock contrast of things that are pristine or white, things that are like black and charred, and everything, through the way the materials guided me, It kind of always linked back, It became very cyclic to the history.

[4] Is it any different with the installation created on the first floor at the show in Le Havre ?

The installation I created on the bottom, on the first floor - three tons of salt, this wardrobe that burnt -, I really like this idea of how, well, something that comes out quite often in my practice, this idea of re-enchanting everyday objects, these banalities that we kind of get used to seeing and refinding the magic within them. And of course, myself, having grown up - being born in the 80s, I grew up with the story of the magic cupboard. And I just kept thinking of that, this cupboard, that is this place that you, as a little person, you hide in, you open, and it’s this whole other world.
And you know, obviously we’re also thinking about how the city was destroyed by 82 percent. And when you walk around today, obviously you see that, you see the difference in architecture, but it wasn’t so long ago, and it’s such a traumatic thing, and you would think that you would feel it more. And obviously that comes back to what the world is going through right now, I just couldn’t get that out of my mind. To be in a city that…82 percent, that’s so huge ! and that’s happening, and just, it just creates something internally. That I felt that the pieces needed to speak to that, but also needed to remind one that through fictions, we give ourselves tools to rethink the future in new ways. You have to dream, you have to keep being optimistic. You have to recognize these, almost confront, these horrors, to ingest them. And I collect a lot of old things. And I had this bottle that comes from, like, the 1940s, milk of magnesia and so, and I actually put this bottle in the show, and it’s funny, because I kept reading it as milk of amnesia. And I thought that was very poignant, because what are we remembering, and what are we taking to forget and this idea of a magic potion, and how everything is so layered and so complex.

[5] You use magic, organic materials, how would you describe yourself and your art ?

I think it’s always important to inject as much as possible of yourself into your work. And the things that I believe in obviously come out into my practice. I consider myself simply an artist who works with organic materials. I mean, I guess you could say like, these are sort of potions I feel like most of the time there is definitely a social aspect, an ecological aspect related to what I’m doing. So I try and create situations that provoke a thought that’s larger than what’s taking place in the art space. So maybe that’s a sort of alchemy.

[6] Do you sometimes work with scientists ?

So I have actually tried to work with scientists in the past, but it hasn’t really worked out, because there’s kind of been this frustration where the things that I do, I’ve been doing for so long that it’s kind of like this grandmother’s recipe. And I’d like to see how materials live their own lives. Whereas, when you work with a scientist, you will be asked, how much did you put in ? I’ve actually worked with scientists on three different occasions, and you’re asked, what are the quantities ? What did you observe ? Like, the terminology is so different to how I address my practice, on how I work and how I go about it, and just even the method. So, I mean, definitely, there’ve been experiences that I’ve learned from, but it’s not compatible.

[7] Would you say your pieces are alive and are they made to last ?

Almost always. So usually when I create works, I think it’s important to photograph, document the works in the beginning of the show, where things are mostly liquid, and then at the end of the show, when things have kind of crystallized, transformed. It’s true that in my practice, I mean, salt has always been present, whether there’s a pinch or ten tons. But it’s not just salt that I’m using. I’ve been using soap and roots of, like, stubs, I don’t even, I don’t know if you call it stubs, but like, end bits of plants that appear dead, and then they regrow, things that wilt, things that seep. It’s been much more, a much richer vocabulary of materials. Whereas these past few years I’ve kind of been very focused on more colored bodies of liquid. So obviously I have to think about what will last. And it’s not about things disappearing, it’s about things transforming. The materials they live their own lives. I like to say that I set up the conditions where I kind of have an idea of what would happen, but then the materials do their own thing. It depends on the encounters. It depends on the humidity. When you’re in front of my work you just have to accept that it has its own life and it’s doing its thing, and something will remain. And that’s also the beauty of it. It’s kind of like us, what will remain ?

[8] Your show is part of the festival ’Normandie Impressioniste’, what is your relation to this movement ?

When we think impressionist, we think color, light, landscape. And these are actually quite important aspects of my practice, creating these landscapes to kind of mentally lose oneself within. And colors have always been so important. So I would say what I realized is, we really do not know enough women impressionists, and I read about someone really wonderful only recently, Lilla Cabot Perry. And really, I feel like her works are so…there’s something quite dark about them. It’s like this American impressionist style, it really is hauntingly beautiful, and I felt like, it’s too bad that we don’t speak about these women more enough during this festival. Maybe we will !

Les liens avec les thématiques culturelles des programmes

Les liens avec les thématiques culturelles des programmes sont les suivants :

● Voyages et migrations (cycle 4)
● Rencontre avec d’autres cultures (cycle 4)
● Représentation de soi et rapport à autrui (2nde)
● La création et le rapport aux arts (2nde)
● Le passé dans le présent (2nde)
● Identités et échanges (cycle terminal)
● Art et pouvoir (cycle terminal)
● Diversité et inclusion (cycle terminal)
● Fictions et réalités (cycle terminal)
● Territoire et mémoire (cycle terminal)

Spécialités :
● LLCER - Imaginaire - imagination créatrice et visionnaire
● LLCER - Arts et débat d’idées
● LLCER - Voyages, territoires, frontières - ancrage et héritage
● LLCER-AMC - Relation au monde - héritage commun et diversité

Conclusion

L’article proposé s’inscrit dans une dynamique de projets culturels développée dans l’Académie de Normandie. Les ressources proposées par M. Locoge visent à initier l’exploration de nouveaux thèmes culturels au sein des classes grâce à l’utilisation de nouveaux documents, la variété des thématiques abordées permettant en effet d’enrichir la compétence culturelle des élèves.

Pour aller plus loin :
Site internet de Bianca Bondi : https://biancabondi.com/
Site internet du Portique : https://www.leportique.org/
Projets avec les scolaires du Portique : https://www.leportique.org/mediations/scolaires