What is the time of research and experimentation for you?
Let us imagine the human body: the time in which you speak is all that exists and it moves just beneath the skin.
It is a time that lies outside the timeline, it does not end with the beginning but continues at a different pace right up to the final repetition of the performance in question. Or rather, it carries on even afterwards in a different form, in different bodies.
I have never been interested in form as a starting point. I consider it more of a consequence or, to borrow Marta Olivieri’s words on choreography, something emerging.
If the time of research is everything that moves me, form resembles a skin containing the tumult. It has the same porous nature, the same profound dialogue with the present.
It protects and informs.
Silent.
In what ways is your practice influenced by the space of an artistic residency?
The choice of working with performance art is largely linked to the huge need to constantly dialogue with the world.
Perhaps I am simply a result of the productive system in which I was born but I would consider it very complicated to create a whole work in a single space and in a single compact time. Productive compactness makes me feel as though I am in an ascetic world, so untroubled as to become sterile.
Where I need windows.
A lot, a whole lot, and to be able to throw them open when I need to.
Starting a residency in a new space, knowing that I have only a few days, being aware that I do not want to ignore the context keeps me in a very fertile state of tension. My work always starts with an idea (which usually takes the shape of a question) and that is it. I look for all the rest in the places I go through. In the people I speak with, in the rooms / studios / garages / museums that host me for research, in the people in the bar where I have a coffee during my coffee break, in chance encounters in streets I do not know….
How do care and artistic research interact?
Just like for the other questions, here to my answer is deeply personal. Curating for me corresponds to people who stem my research with flowing outlines. In this particular instance it corresponds first and foremost to Giulia Traversi who has been tracking my work for years, who shares with me the room and the reflections, the reading and the cups of coffee with people encountered. Having Giulia observing everything from a slightly higher position allows me to stay on the gorund, to stick my neck out a lot with my subject matter in the knowledge that someone from on high is continuing to keep an eye on the broader context.
It also means having a person who constantly sends me messages from the world who keeps monitoring the subtle and constant exchange between inside and outside, Who envisages future spaces and possible situations.
Then, in addition to Giulia, there are other curators whom we meet along the way. Some of them come back over time, others pass through and leave a wake. With them, for me, curating is declined in very intense pills that are more limited in time. Moments in which I like placing the subject matter in their hands and seeing what it sounds like.
What are we going to be working on while in residency?
On the explosion of the subject matter.
We have a small, restless story, we need to rehearse it over and over again to discover what form the anger and despair that were agitating it at the beginning has now taken on and, once we have found it, to let it go free.
Then, once again, re-educating in a form.
Chiara Bersani is an Italian performer and author active in the field of performing arts, research theater and contemporary dance. As an interpreter and as a director / choreographer moves through different languages and visions. Her works, presented in international circuits, are born as creations in dialogue with spaces of different nature and are mainly aimed at a "neighbor" to the scene. Her research as an interpreter and author is based on the concept of the “Political Body” and the creation of practices aimed at training its presence and action.
The "manifest" work of this research is Gentle Unicorn, a performance included in the Aerowaves platform.
For the rigor in embodying this study she is awarded the UBU Award for best new actress / performer under 35 for 2018.
In August 2019, during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Gentle Unicorn and Chiara Bersani won the first prize in the dance category of the Total Theater Awards.
Chiara Bersani is an artist of Apap – Advancing Performing arts project - Feminist Future util 2024.
www.chiarabersani.it