Objects as actants

Between fairytale and apocalypse, Bianca Bondi’s installations and sculptures plunge the viewer into a universe both strange and familiar, where past, present and future intermix.

As if in a waking dream or inner drift, her works suspend the boundaries between the astral and earthly worlds, realms of the living and the dead, the visible and invisible.

The installation that Bianca Bondi is producing specifically for the first floor of the Crac Occitanie is the fruit of a three-week residency, in partnership with La cité scolaire Paul Valéry in Sète, which is welcoming her in the month of February for a period of creation while immersed in the city.

Working in connection to the exhibition site, its aura and its secret archaeology, Bianca Bondi proposes custom-made landscapes for the spaces in which she intervenes. Gardens, fountains and rooms are transfigured by the use of various chemical, climatic, olfactory, sound and light phenomena. For over a decade, she has been using ephemeral and organic materials like wax, plants, spirulina, spices and especially salt, which has become her material of choice, both for its strong symbolism and its chemical properties. Present in religions as well as in spiritual and pagan practices, it is associated with a protective function, and repels the evil eye. In addition to its sacred dimension, it is also an essential component of body fluids. Paradoxically, salt corrodes, oxidises and permanently alters the objects it covers in Bianca Bondi’s installations.

What can seem like a gradual destruction stems rather from a potential for transformation and regeneration. The artist even speaks of an “energy transfer” between the elements.
Bianca Bondi’s installations themselves undergo a continuous metamorphosis: one sees copper objects becoming covered in bluish stains, animal skeletons invaded by crystals, water that slowly turns from purple to crimson. Likewise, her showcases, which she herself describes as living still lives, consist of skilful amalgamations of found and personal objects, relics, plants, covered in crystals, stains and oxidation. Encapsulated and as if suspended in a frozen time, these micro-landscapes are in fact constantly evolving.

Bianca Bondi masters the alchemy of the materials she uses. She is getting to know them more and more, but for the most part, the organic or inorganic objects she summons have their own life, beyond of all human control. Thus the “actant objects” evoked in the exhibition title—a term borrowed from philosopher Bruno Latour—remind us that every object is a fully-fledged actor of the world, in a political ecology that involves the co-evolution of all beings, human and nonhuman. This is the source of the fundamental unpredictability that is the driving force behind Bianca Bondi’s installations: substances parasitise them, and in so doing, establish relations, connect to one another, and create new alliances, with or without us.
Marie Cozette

Exhibition partners :

The installation that Bianca Bondi is producing specifically for the first floor of the Crac Occitanie is the fruit of a three-week residency, in partnership with La cité scolaire Paul Valéry in Sète, which is welcoming her in the month of February for a period of creation while immersed in the city.