<p>Conjuring the power of chemical reactions and magic, her installations exist halfway between natural science and the occult<br><br></p>
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Sarah Matia Pasqualetti

Discover Bianca Bondi’s shamanic practice

<p>In collaboration with <em>Numéro art</em></p>

<p>Bianca Bondi practices magic using the cosmic energy found in people and things. Her frame of reference is Wicca, one of the principal forms of neo-paganism, which promotes Earth and nature worship, and proposes a lifestyle in harmony with the environment. </p>
<p>Bondi chooses the components that make up her pieces according to their energy and symbolic power, striving to activate or channel these forces according to the needs of each installation, most of which are site-specific. The objects that interest her have a past life and must therefore be purified before use. Bondi performs rituals to cleanse their aura by exposing them to the four elements, either materially (for example to tears or a candle flame) or mentally, in an intense effort of visualization and meditation.</p>
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<p>The occult practice of scrying, one of the oldest divination rituals, is evoked in Bondi’s work through the presence of saltwater pools. This art of divination through psychic images detected in a reflective surface is intended to connect us to the invisible world through our faculty for second sight. Her circular floor openings were inspired by the <em>cenotes </em>(freshwater pits or sinkholes) into which the Maya threw offerings for the underworld. In some of her installations, such as the ‘Lost and Found’ series (2021), copper coins, flowers, feathers, the bones of birds, shells, and bric-a-brac lie at the bottom of the pools – by offering these objects to the spirits, Bondi acts as a mediator between this world and the next. <br></p>

<p>In&nbsp;<em>Beltane Oracle&nbsp;</em>(2023), shown at Paris’s Lafayette Anticipations, ceramic bowls evoke lunar craters and refer to the Yoni symbol of female energy. Filled with magic potions – a mixture of holy water and breast milk – the bowls balance out the phallicism of the charred black poles standing at the center of this ‘Zen’ garden, in keeping with the Wiccan principle of natural harmony between the feminine and the masculine. The five poles reference not only the esoteric symbol of the pentagram but also the digits of a hand emerging from below ground, their extremities illuminated by crystals of quartz. As for the work’s title, it refers to both Maypole celebrations (a fertility rite linked to the end of winter) and the festival of Beltane, held on the night of 30 April – a spring equivalent to the better-known Hallowe’en, that similarly disrupts the veil between the living and the dead.</p>

<p>Located between the material and the spiritual, the sacred and the profane, the visible and the invisible, life and death, psychic projection and physical surface, the conscious and the dream world, Bondi’s works are liminal places – thresholds, bridges, or gateways between two very different dimensions. This in-between is also evoked by medicinal and protective plants, most of which are stabilized – meaning they cannot wither – and they too are in a state of transition between the living and the non-living. It’s no accident that the plant Bondi uses most is amaranth, which in pagan rituals provides a safe protected gateway from the world of the living to the kingdom of the dead. </p>
<p>Bondi’s work deploys an intense material and energetic activity, with various chemical solutions that amplify the processes of liquefaction, concretion, crystallization, or oxidation, so that the spaces of her installations are inhabited by beings in transformation, making them theaters of exchange and encounters between non-human entities. Crystals that form from saline solutions grow, move, and interact with the atmosphere, while on the table in <em>The Private Lives of Non-Human Entities </em>(2020), the various liquids and magico-chemical potions in the bowls and plates ooze and trickle, move and spill, causing fluctuations in color and temperature. The inorganic life of matter, which communicates at a molecular level, unfolds before our eyes as it affirms its own particular forms.</p>

<p>In <em>Wild and Slow </em>(2022), we see bacteria flourish: after entering the protective lunar circle of salt, you are confronted with a worktop-altar on which there are jars containing halobacteria, a lifeform that proliferates in environments rich in dissolved salts. Here, as in other Bondi installations, the hardness of certain metals (for example brass) is contrasted with the salt covering them. Exploring these environments, you feel as though you’re either walking through a dream whose origin is unknown or across a world to arrive where humans have given way to molecular life. In these abandoned places, the purifying power of salt is counterbalanced by the disproportionate quantities in which it is present – on every part of the works and almost all of the floor – so that its power to corrode and destroy organic matter is brought to the fore.</p>
<p>At the heart of Bondi’s installations there is an obvious ambiguity: while they speak of non-human life, the places where that life thrives are those usually occupied by humans – bedrooms, kitchens, worktops, dining tables, etc. Humans are present as an absence, removed from the visual field of a mise-en-scène that retains all the indicators of their presence. Humans are not where we might expect them to be, nor where they should be, and this absence is precisely what affords an opening to more-than-human life. It appears that the condition for these other types of life to proliferate, and for these other types of presence – more secret, more discreet, but no less active – to make themselves felt, is the very absence of human beings. Would it be possible to imagine other material scenarios in which this non-human life could be further deployed? Perhaps the question will be answered at Bondi’s first American museum show, which is programmed for the end of this year at Dallas Contemporary. </p>

<p>This article is part of a yearlong collaboration between Paris+ par Art Basel and <em>Numéro art</em>. Click <a href="https://www.numero.com/fr/numero-art/bianca-biondi-portrait-lafayette-anticipations-acacias-art-center" target="_blank"><strong><em>here </em></strong></a>to read the original article.</p>
<p>Bianca Bondi&nbsp;is represented by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1226/mor-charpentier" target="_blank">mor charpentier</a>&nbsp;(Paris, Bogota).<br></p>
<p>Sarah Matia Pasqualetti is a PhD candidate in aesthetics at Panthéon-Sorbonne University and the co-author of the book <em>-Mais le monde est une Mangrovité.</em>&nbsp;(Rotolux, 2023).</p>
<p>English translation:&nbsp;<em>Numéro art</em>.</p>
<p>Published on June 28, 2023.</p>
<p>Caption for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Bianca Bondi,&nbsp;<em>The Private Lives of Non-Human Entities</em>, 2020. Installation view in the group show ‘Chapter 3HREE’, Het HEM, Zandaam,&nbsp;2020. Photograph by&nbsp;Martin Freiherr van Hagen and Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk © Courtesy of the artist and mor charpentier.&nbsp;2.&nbsp;Bianca Bondi,&nbsp;<em>Wild and slow</em>, 2022. Photograph by Andreas B. Krueger. © Bianca Bondi, ADAGP. 3.&nbsp;Bianca Bondi,&nbsp;<em>The Antechamber (Tundra Swan)</em>, 2020. Installation view in the group show ‘Words at an Exhibition’, Busan Biennale,&nbsp;2020. © Bianca Bondi. Courtesy of the artist and Busan Biennale.</p>

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