Claudi Piripippi (Borgna) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice has evolved over several decades through installation, performance, video, poetry and socially engaged art. Born in Germany and raised in Italy, her creative life has taken her through London and Los Angeles, alongside residencies and exhibitions across Europe, Canada and the United States.
Borgna first became widely known for her large-scale installations made from discarded plastic bags. Beautiful, strange and deliberately contradictory, these sprawling constructions transformed one of the most ordinary symbols of consumer culture into landscapes that appeared almost organic. Repeated, rearranged and animated by air, weather and their surroundings, the bags became a way of questioning consumption, waste and the increasingly blurred relationship between the natural and man-made worlds.
That concern with the environment has never disappeared, but over time Borgna’s attention has moved increasingly towards the body and the inner landscape. Video, initially used simply to document installations, gradually became a medium in its own right, while performance emerged almost accidentally through the physical realities of making, transporting and installing her work. What began with materials has developed into a much broader examination of how we inhabit the world, how experience is held within the body and how art might become a means of transformation.
Her current practice brings together ecofeminism, spirituality, language, memory and personal history. Domestic labour, care, gender, grief and belonging sit alongside wider questions around environmental responsibility and social structures. Rather than treating these subjects separately, Borgna sees them as interconnected parts of the same enquiry: a process of recognising what has been fragmented and attempting to bring those pieces back together.
This is particularly evident in her Interactive Poems, performative works in which language becomes physical and communal. Words are not simply read or heard, but used as prompts for participation, emotion and release. The audience is invited to respond, creating an exchange that shifts the work away from conventional performance towards something more intimate and collective.
There is an openness to Borgna’s practice that resists easy categorisation. Humour can sit beside grief, the political beside the deeply personal, and ecological concerns beside questions of love, care and spirituality. Underlying it all is an ongoing desire to understand how we relate to ourselves, to one another and to the environments we inhabit.
In this interview, Borgna reflects on the journey from her monumental plastic bag installations to video, performance and interactive poetry, and discusses feminism, environmental crisis, domestic labour, spirituality and the search for a more authentic way of making and living.
Your practice has evolved from large-scale installations made with recycled plastic bags towards video, performance and interactive poetry. What prompted this shift, and how do you see these different stages of your work connecting?
At first, video was just a tool.
While at Djerassi in 2009, a fellow artist in residence suggested I document ‘Blow me away if you can!’ with his camcorder. This large-scale installation was once again set outdoors, kinetically interacting with the natural elements, this time the wind.
On top of the Californian rolling hills, the bags were catching not just the coastal marine fog. San Francisco’s Bay Area coastal mountain ranges are packed with narrow gaps, and when a massive volume of marine air is forced through them, the wind speed accelerates. This natural phenomenon, together with the airflow rushing from high to low pressure, from the ocean inland, impregnated the bags, the Californian winds breathing them as if they were lungs.
So this was my first approach to video, to capture the movement of these flower-shaped bags, inflating and deflating at the air’s whims.
Prior to that, during my very first artist residency, which was at I-Park in Connecticut in 2006, artist in residence Daniel O. Bachmann, a German writer who had previously worked in documentary film, taught me the importance of documenting my work. He prompted me to shoot hundreds of photos of ‘…and they lived happily ever after…’ capturing it through all light changes, day and night, and from all angles, near and far. To this day, I have no clue about photography. I follow my trained eye’s innate sensitivity, leaving the camera on automatic to do the rest.
Back to video. For a while, I kept borrowing cameras here and there, relying on other people to edit or at least extract and save the footage on cassette or DVD. Eventually, this proved to be a stressful approach, chasing everybody up while keeping track of my own deadlines.
I came across a camcorder again in 2010 in the flat I was subletting in Berlin. Here, I started to play with the editing process using the technology I had access to on my little MacBook. Still using the bags as a subject, I experimented with making short videos. In Berlin, I also bought my first video camera, a cheap, low-resolution, small Panasonic with which I documented the next installations and started to perform with the bags in front of the camera. Often my mother, whose good eye I trusted, would substitute for the tripod.
From tool to medium, I love to film an idea out of my head onto camera and then watch it from different angles. I am not interested in, and don’t enjoy, the technical aspects. What appeals to me are the alchemical possibilities the editing process presents. To me, video, more than being technical, is a spiritual bridge: a medium. Clairvoyant, that is, it sees mental images and symbols, hears internal and external voices and perceives emotional states that might belong to a spiritual realm. Like an antenna, it receives information by tuning into the frequency of an ‘otherworldly’. Somehow, a mysterious magical lens, it connects me with something unseen, subtle details that I would otherwise miss.
Because, you see, what I am really after is the energetic transmission of emotions. How could they be visually translated via a technological device? Can they ooze out, leap across the barrier of my limitations, in this case my lack of technological knowledge?
At first, performance was just a modus operandi.
Like video, performance too came in gradually and naturally. Moving around hundreds, when not thousands, of plastic bags by public transport prompted all sorts of creative packaging strategies. Mostly, I would be wearing them or dragging them around train and bus stations, when not airports, inside humongous custom(e)-made vessels, which I guess you could call sculptures.
Even packing, boxing up thousands of bags at the end of an exhibition or residency, was a crazy act. To push and squeeze, fit as many as possible and compact them into the smallest number and size of boxes, was a performance in itself.
Once, I even prepared an installation for an exhibition in a tiny single room in a budget hotel, finishing off the larger parts in a car park.
I also remember the time I carried ‘It always rains on wet’, an installation made out of about 1,500 bags, by myself from my then North London storage to Christie’s in South Kensington. I was quick to grab the old stroller left on the kerb that fortune had sent my way! For the first part of my journey, I hopped on a double-decker bus before getting on the tube. I will forever be so grateful to the young men dressed in suits who, during rush hour, helped me lift the stroller up the stairs, never questioning the gigantic ‘baby’ strapped inside. That, I call British politeness. It was a very humbling experience.
Usually on my bicycle, in a rental car or using whatever cheapest means of transport was available, when in the UK from Victoria to Birmingham, from Paddington to Wales, from Devon to Berlin, my bags took over almost whole sections of train carriages. Not fitting in, in the conventional traveller role, and taking over space made me feel awkward. Also, as a foreigner, I felt ashamed, dirty, unworthy, different. I had to keep telling myself that I am an artist, on a special delivery mission, transporting special goods, cargo in the name and for the sake of ART! And therefore, as an artist, I have licence to kill!
Nobody ever complained, but people always looked, stared, wondered; some with curiosity, others with avoiding eyes, some with the fear that said: ‘What’s up with this chick now?’
To have the attention of people felt nerve-racking, scary yet exhilarating.
Once in the role, a special burst of energy moved me, like a sort of electrifying pride, a defiance, a desire to break rules, to stand up and out, to dare, to be me. In other words, the transportation of the bags opened me up to performance.
This is how video and performance slipped into my practice, little by little, until the bags moved out of the picture. The last big push was graduating from a socially engaged MFA.
There had always been a performative aspect to my work. But it took me years, and a pool of MFA professors, to completely trust this side of me. Feminist art and theory also had a huge impact on my current practice. I only came to understand the political side of my work, and of my life, thanks to my MFA professors and my then-partner, Chicana poet Verònica Reyes.
Prior to that, to be fair, I had already experimented with performance. In ‘Walking through field of emptiness’, I destroyed and transformed a field of a thousand plastic bags I had made for my BFA graduation show in 2005. That was my very first art performance, and in retrospect a good one too.
Coming to the present, ‘how to perform my true self’, or better, ‘how not to perform’, is the question that drives my current practice. Anti-performance, that is, the authentic creative sharing of lyrical interior movements threaded into a conceptual and spiritual framework.
At first, the Interactive Poems were just a seed.
I have been exposed to quite a bit of poetry. Not just via my first degree in Foreign Literature (1989), but also through living with poet Verònica Reyes, my ex-spouse. Looking back, I believe that the Interactive Poems, too, are rooted in my early work with plastic bags.
Titles. These are really important to me. Titles have always been another creative outlet. Back then, they provided an opportunity to lyrically engage with my installations.
Through titles, I could verbally communicate the emotion that drove the concept of the work. I used titles either to better define or complement, to open up a gap of inquiry or add an edge. Often using questions or exclamation marks, I like to invite the viewer into a conversation. Questions, to me, are a tool for drawing people in and engaging them. By asking a question, I check in with you, very much in the spirit of ‘How are you today?’ or ‘What’s the weather like on your end?’ I am not only starting a dialogue but also throwing the ball back, asking: ‘Can I play with you?’ or ‘Do you want to play with me?’
My work has always been multilayered. There is the conceptual, the emotional, the aesthetic, the environmental, the political, the personal, the lyrical and the spiritual layer. To me, it’s important to offer multiple entry points to access the work and, hopefully, connect on some level.
‘Blue, instruction for an interactive poem: hug and howl, sing, shout, scream, sigh out your (BLUE)’ is the first of an ongoing series of what I named The Interactive Poems. I wrote it in 2021 after the death of Rinaldo, my beloved stepfather.
Not just my own grieving coping mechanism to purge pain, The Interactive Poems are a calling for the audience to meet me on common ground. With them, I invite listeners to join in to create a magnetic field of ‘Healing Engagement’. Through these performative works, grief is manifested physically and communally by tuning in, relating, sharing and taking part, each person with their own ache.
The nature of the Interactive Poems is both conceptual and spiritual. They entail a process of becoming, of individuation, of building conscious awareness, which ultimately I believe is a collective social endeavour.
Trying to figure out how language has moulded me and my relationships, I ask myself: which words have created, or displaced, my reality? And most importantly, how can I reprogramme myself by revisiting old meanings with a renewed perspective? I think of Gloria Anzaldúa, who spoke of the language of the head, the language of the heart and the language of the gut. I am a conceptual artist hoping to live words in the body, to understand words not just in the head but in the body too.
Each one waiting for the right season to sprout, The Interactive Poems are deeply rooted in my soul. They voice the words my inner child could not. Despite being sort of trilingual, I was never taught to build an emotional dictionary. My vocabulary is limited, yet, according to Brené Brown, 87 emotions live in me. Can words then unlock these emotions from the body, where they hide in remote visceral corners? How can I express them so as to recognise them, and recognise them so as to express them, in order to deepen the relationship with myself and consequently with others?
Surreal. Words are surreal, emotions are surreal. I am a child still learning to articulate feelings. The Interactive Poems are therefore my quest for decluttering the bundle of emotions that inhabit the unresolved inside of me. How can I stop transmitting the stream of invisible toxic particles reverberating in the atmosphere, polluting my relationship with the world?
To come back to your initial question, ‘How do you see these different stages of your work connecting?’ Well, hopefully by reading this interview the connections will become apparent.
To me, I can only say it has been a slow, natural process of learning and evolving, a sort of chain reaction of interconnecting events, cosmic forces guiding me to experience what ultimately is an existential spiritual search on a lyrical glitch.
You have described the environmental crisis as both an external reality and something experienced within the body. How do the inner and outer landscapes meet in your work?
Could they meet in the gap that divides them, in the void that exists between a word and an emotion, the void that I try to capture with my practice? Could they meet in the reality that bears so many layers, the layers I am unfolding, aiming to understand and ultimately accept? At different times, shaking hands, they meet in rage, the inner and the outer, both landscapes of reaction that I am trying to cure with love. The kind of love I was never taught. Anger and love, two sides of the same coin, my work meets them in the declination of colours stretched across the rainbow of my emotions.
They meet in their air, water, noise, soil, in the pollution that runs through my body, invisibly so. In the ecosystem of my moods, needs, thoughts, feelings, desires, in the thermodynamics of my works: molecules reacting at the different temperatures of global warming.
They meet in the cognitive tissue of an existential perspective, a pattern woven into the fabric of my ideas. Starting from the plastic bags, what has changed now is the direction of focus: I have flipped it around, pointing the finger directly at me, at the inner part of the self.
Beyond formal stylistic concerns, they meet in the search for re-enchantment, in the spiritual activism connecting self/environment to the sacred.
Your practice brings together ecological concerns, feminism, spirituality and personal transformation. How do you prevent these ideas from competing with one another, and allow them to form a coherent visual language?
Theoretically and practically, I see feminism, spirituality and personal transformation not as competing but as complementing each other. They are all part of a whole that has been fragmented and disconnected, chopped apart into separate pieces when, in fact, they’re all deeply interconnected. The real work now is to reconnect the dismembered pieces, female and male, binary energies coming together with a renewed consciousness. Because ultimately there cannot be spirituality without feminism, and feminism without spirituality, and therefore no self-transformation either. To me, they all go under the umbrella of eco-feminism, re-enchantment theory and ultimately spiritual activism.
In regard to my work, yes, it might not yet be logically well organised, easily recognisable or understandable. All the different parts might not yet connect naturally, and my argument might not yet be clearly manifested visually, but there is a narrative of feelings and ideas that links my works together.
Even if I am not yet totally conscious, lucid and able to express myself clearly enough to form a harmonious, stable pattern, myself still being fragmented, I trust that the core concepts will eventually manifest in a unified design. The underlying intent is transformation through creative eco-feminist spiritual activism, which goes hand in hand with, and impacts and shapes, my art practice. Plus, I am a patois sort of speaking person. Being bicultural and having been deeply affected by the Lebanese community in London and by the Latino one in Los Angeles, my visual imagery, too, grows out of a blend of different languages.
Not only that, lately I have been dwelling on the meaning of Compassion vs. Competition. Compassion is ‘the sharing through deep tenderness’. Competition, instead, is ‘the action of trying to gain what another is trying to gain at the same time’. Then there is Complement, ‘something that completes, enhances, or makes something else look, taste, or function better’. Com-passion, Com-petition and Com-plement share the same Latin root, ‘com’, meaning ‘with’, ‘together’. I have slowly arrived at a crossroads where my desire to be ‘with’ is to let the process unfold the interdependent chaotic order of my inner biodiversity. I want to enjoy the magical process of art-making without the angst that competition causes, and maybe one day a clear visual identity will emerge out of my human psychosis.
For many years, you transformed discarded plastic bags in response to different geographical, political and emotional environments. What did this material allow you to express that more conventional art materials could not?
The bags are ubiquitous, easily available and mouldable. Despite a degree in sculpture and several years playing with ceramics, I have never been interested in the technical aspects of sculpture. I understand materiality, yes, I love to make, tinker and use my bare hands. But what really gets me going is experimenting with the alchemical love potions that brew from mixing ideas with materials, the interaction between concept, space, context, chance and the elements. To transform through minimal intervention is another important aspect. I don’t want to change the true essence, interfere too much with the nature of a material or of a site, but only highlight a possibility by turning on a beam that creates a ‘mirage’: a recontextualisation of the intrinsic identity of the material.
Petrol is the raw material of plastic bags. Refined from unrefined, how best to represent the concept of a cycle by replicating it with the bags, only this time ‘spectacularising’ their domestic aspect, meaning the colonised, domesticated condition of the raw oil, by putting it back into nature, also reshaped in nature-inspired forms?
In the spirit of honouring the environmental aspect of my work, the bags could also easily be collected, recycled, reused, repurposed and reinterpreted. They are the perfect ready-made. I don’t want to add more stuff. I am not interested in object-making and do not want to create anything permanent, but rather something ephemeral and transitional. In a sort of artist DIY survival method, I wanted to test how far I could get with very little, explore potential, see what was possible by applying my innate, childish, non-specialised craft and create a combustion between intuitive ancestral skills in relation to a specific context.
Often a painstakingly meditative process of reordering and rearranging through simple repetitive movements, the same ones performed by our hands and bodies every day, working with thousands of bags was a process of sorting out: the bags and my thoughts. How much do we accomplish through these bodily, overlooked movements, every day interacting with and impacting our environments?
Ultimately, the bags offered a collaborative companionship, serving as symbol and metaphor for capitalist consumerist society. Another declination of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil theory, they allowed me to investigate the tension between nature and culture and explore the relationship between mundanity and banality, the latter I came to understand as a lack of conscious awareness that normalises unhealthy behaviours far too often. Overall, to this day, I cannot think of a better medium to tackle environmental issues in relation to banality and consumerism.
Care, cleaning, cooking, planting and other everyday activities appear within your thinking as creative and political acts. How has domestic labour influenced your understanding of art-making and resistance?
Integral to domestic activities, the bags were a vessel through which I could represent the everyday, drawing parallels between the overlooked and taken-for-granted aspects of our daily lifestyles, domestic being the keyword here.
Care, cleaning and cooking, and also planting, are domestic chores. They belong to household affairs. The domestic is our closest and most intimate environment, a realm that still very much ‘belongs’ to l’angelo della casa (the angel of the house). I remember my Italian stepdad lovingly teasing my German mum using this very idiom, knowing damn well how much she did not like it. In Italy, the angelo della casa is the woman. ‘Natural law’ entrusted not him but her with the household. She is caregiver and caretaker of everything that lives in the domestic: the jurisdiction of housekeeping.
In the essay titled ‘The Angel of the House’, Virginia Woolf writes about how women were expected to think or feel and not have a mind of their own. In her speech titled Professions for Women, given in 1931 to the Women’s Service League, she describes this female-only figure as a phantom, a very hard one to kill.
When I think of the angel of the house, what comes to mind are domestic animals that have been tamed or bred by humans (patriarchs) to live alongside them as pets rather than in the wild. More specifically, the image in my head is of women on a leash, infantilised and relegated to the indoors, the outdoors an unwelcoming territory, when not a forbidden land. I still suffer from impostor syndrome out there. It’s a sort of ancestral fear, a mistrust towards an outside world whose rules have not been conceived for my thriving and, as a matter of fact, don’t suit me at all.
Care, then, to me, is a double-edged sword, a word loaded with mixed feelings.
My grandma Maria Rosa was a traditional Italian, heavy-duty domestic housekeeper. She was also a wife, a mother and a grandmother, and a FIAT factory worker (operaia), and a gardener, and an active Christian devotee, another job that requires a ton of work visible only, I hope, to God’s eyes, because his physical home too needs cleaning and caring for.
She died young. I was nine years old, but until then I spent the whole summer holidays, plus Easter and Christmas, at her home. She was my main reference as well as my uncredited training for care. Cleaning, cooking, taking care of things and people is ingrained in my psyche, on top of being expected of me because I am female. Not only that, being the only child of a working single mother who rebelled against the angel of the house role, I had to contribute to the housekeeping from early childhood.
Not considered a profession, care is work, but women’s housework has never been viewed as such. Domestic care is, in fact, labour. A lower-ranking type of work that ‘doesn’t’ require any particular kind of knowledge or skill, a labour that everybody could do but nobody wants to, a labour that most people dislike and, until not very long ago, was considered suitable for females only. Poorly remunerated, if at all, domestic work is unrecognised, an activity not worthy of respect. Shameful, the dirt we produce, not only as bodies, triggers the emotion of shame. Naked in front of our primary needs, cleaning is the embarrassing reminder of our non-divine human nature.
But capitalist society rests on women’s unpaid work, the hardship of their bodies only another exploitable resource, as Marxist feminist scholar Silvia Federici reminds us in her writing. Caretaking and housekeeping are essential nurturing activities that have conveniently been undermined by a patriarchal society.
I descend from a line of angels of the house. I am a recipient of women who have put up with, resisted, undergone, endured, allowed, tolerated, permitted, enabled, swallowed, faced, suffered and worked to the advantage of an abusive employer. To negate their work would be to continue to perpetuate the same system that undervalues people’s lives. An artist, a woman, a queer, a housekeeper and a caregiver, my emancipatory journey is deeply rooted in the footsteps of my many mothers and sisters. By working within the domestic sphere, women might have no power in society, but people’s lives are literally in their hands. Women are responsible for humans’ most important bodily functions. As keepers, we undertake daily chores that require important decision-making skills. These decisions affect not just us or our loved ones, but the environment too.
Constantly confronted by a series of practical, philosophical and, yes, spiritual quests, the never-ending cycle of housekeeping starts with the grocery shopping, carries on with the cooking, cleaning, washing, arranging and organising, and relentlessly continues with all the other endless problem-solving and invisible tasks required to manage a household. In other words, domestic economy, which entails the practical art of running a house, budgeting and handling food and supplies, from food waste to water and energy saving, to beautifying and maintaining our environments. And what about the use of all those toxic detergents? Can we then say that housekeeping is much like the work of an activist, social and environmental, or of a manager, or a politician, and, yes, of an artist?
I have been carrying my phantom into every relationship, even lesbian ones, sadly finding no equity around housekeeping matters. The issue of the value of maintenance vs. production remains an open wound, as housekeeping will continue to be the foundational activity of the life of any society, on which all other professions rest.
In 2014, I started placing the figure of the housekeeper outside: in nature, in urban environments, in video and digital art, and even in space, also blending her roles with that of the female artist. Based on my personal experience as a caregiver who is also an artist, I wanted to draw parallels between the invisibility of the labour of housekeeping and that of art-making.
In the ‘Beauty Parlour Series’ (2014-2018), the angel of the house steps outside to question whether the cleaning up of the planet, too, rests on women’s shoulders. She is an eco-feminist caregiver claiming visibility and, by doing so, exposing the covert shame in which her role is cloaked.
Intersecting art-making with caretaking, ‘We Are Making Art’ and ‘I Am Working’ (2018-2020) are a feminist take on John Baldessari’s 1971 video performance titled ‘I Am Making Art’. While his emphasis is on performative actions over the formal preoccupations of painting, as well as being a reaction to body art, mine is on the invisibility of women’s labour instead.
These performances explore housekeeping and care as spaces for resistance and domestic activism. Here, social and environmental justice converge, offering a possibility for change.
Planting, another form of caring. Plants and planting have always been another important aspect of my work too. Like planting my plastic bags out in the environment, which also required looking after and caring for them, or working directly with plants, for example in ‘Dancing with my plants’ (2017), ‘Love plants with me’ (2018) and ‘Portal’ (2023), where I am forming a partnership with plants. To tune into plants’ vibrations and learn from the humbling labour of these silent beings, which so generously provide for our living while also beautifying our world with harmonious grace and tranquillity, is not only an ever-inspiring example of unconditional love, but also another form of spiritual activism.
You often use the body as both subject and medium. What becomes possible when an idea is physically performed rather than represented through a static object?
Building awareness, I get to know, I get in touch with my body. Mine is a female, feminist, queer, ageing body. On the outside, it’s also white and able. It’s a privileged body, but what about on the inside? What does it look like? How does it feel in there?
The body, then, is the portal to another dimension, mostly still unknown to me. It’s like I am being the pioneer, for lack of a better term, and perhaps proof of just how ingrained patriarchal language is, of my own land, where I am stranded, looking for refuge on the island of my own body. So far, I was taught that I had to conquer my body with my mind and control it. But is another approach also possible? Could I have a different kind of relationship with my body? One that is more equal, healthier, more respectful, more honouring, more grateful and graceful, more positive, more accepting, more loving?
Like a plastic bag, the body is mundane and objectifiable, so how do I make the passage from object to subject? How do I de-objectify/decolonise my female body? Dematerialise it, yet honour the true matter of life that I get to experience thanks to my body?
Everything I do is with and through my body. The body is the same and yet it changes all the time. Everything enters me and exists through my body, which is the vital condition of my being and therefore of my art-making. To me, art-making and the body cannot be separated. They belong to and depend on one another.
In The Order of Time, physicist Carlo Rovelli dismantles the idea of time as a universal, steadily flowing river, explaining that the universe is made of events rather than things, a collection of relations and happenings rather than static objects.
By performing the body, then, I can create relatively zero-footprint situations, movements that can spark chain reactions of small, entangling engagements, like with The Interactive Poems. Performance allows for directness and immediacy. Points of contact can be created, perceived and reciprocated on both ends, by the receiver and by the artist, almost instantly.
You describe your approach to video as experimental, intuitive and deliberately removed from professional conventions. How do mistakes, technical limitations and imperfect images contribute to the emotional character of the work?
Despite my trying, my videos have an off quality, not only because they are technically poor. I see them as glitches of some sort. All of them are animated by distracting/destructive elements that act like a dam, interrupting a potentially beautiful flow. There is so much that can go wrong in video, so much to resolve. A technical detail, choices made in the moment ruled by moods, too many repetitions, off sound, aspects not properly worked out because of feeling overwhelmed, frustrated or rushed by something else pushing for attention, emphasis on one detail rather than another, timing, inverted or dissonant frame sequences, bad lighting and cropping, lack of depth of field, a retrograde Mercury, and so on. Traversed by a string of imperfections and limitations, these errors form the DNA of my video works. Even though embarrassing, something valuable is still to be learned from them. What matters at the time of creation is to be in the moment, let it dictate my choices, trust the process and the truth it brings.
There is power in the energetic field of what is considered ‘wrong’ or a ‘mistake’. The bumps caused by my errors and limitations are something to be felt, to be experienced. Often annoying, they might have an impact nevertheless, for example by connecting us to the emotion of shame. In other words, it’s the not-knowing, the existential as well as the technical struggle, that becomes palpable to the eye. The video is then a battleground of choices. Rhythms beat out of confusion and feelings rush out for attention.
In some other videos, the audience is invited to feel the sensations the work is depicting as it is screening, like in ‘A strawberry is a strawberry is a strawberry’ (2017). During the viewing of this video performance, where I am eating a strawberry, other sensorial layers, taste, smell and touch, are added to the work by offering strawberries to the viewers, who are invited to eat concurrently with the viewing of the video. This device is intended to engage people’s own bodily sensations as they’re watching mine, while also ‘consuming’ and perceiving the artwork’s body and becoming part of the artwork itself. In this way, different organs come together: the virtual with the physical, the sensorial with the emotional, the erotic with the theoretical and the individual with the communal.
Your itinerant life has taken you through rural and urban environments across different countries. How have movement, displacement and encounters with contrasting landscapes shaped your identity as an artist?
I am still working on my identity. As a person who has gone through many life transitions, geographical and emotional, I am a chameleon, easily adaptable and particularly skilled at fitting in while also always being an outsider. It’s a very helpful defence mechanism.
For a long time, I was branded as the bag lady, an identity that suited me well. At heart, I am still a little bag lady who is torn and fragmented, even though fluidity is what drives me, together with feminism and queerness.
Also, the identity of glitch is important to me. I first encountered this term at an exhibition while in residence at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2010. Later on, Legacy Russell’s book titled Glitch Feminism helped better define its meaning. Her analysis of glitch as a space for possibility and a tool for political and social liberation really appealed to me. Above anything, glitch is like a mantra that reminds me that I am not perfect, not in control of most things, and that right or wrong are artificial, human-made constructions, just like my plastic bag installations are.
More recently, you have turned towards what you call the ‘inner environment’, using your own experiences and vulnerabilities as both the subject and material of the work. Has this made the creative process more challenging or more liberating?
Both!
You are currently exploring the meeting point between the conceptual and the spiritual. What does spirituality offer your practice that political or theoretical frameworks alone cannot provide?
These can no longer be separated, the spiritual and the conceptual.
Conscious awareness, inner and outer, both are necessary movements towards liberation, for the creative soul to thrive. Therefore, the conceptual and the spiritual meet in their shared endeavour of transforming through awareness-building. Call it domestic economy, call it internal affairs, call it housekeeping, call it cleaning or planting or art-making, spiritual activism is also a form of creative political engagement. The development of our souls trickles out into the public realm, impacting relations between selves, individuals, communities and society as a whole.
Duchamp’s urinal freed art from object-making. Our world is cluttered with objects overflowing everywhere. Just like spirituality, conceptual art is a process of dematerialisation towards relational awareness: heart ’n’ mindful connections. Both seek freedom from materialistic consumerist capitalism, from a mindset of accumulation, possession, competition, judgement and resource exploitation.
Just like with the readymades, then, creating new paradigms through the use of the space of language, body and soul shifts our awareness into a new theoretical framework, the one I have started to call ‘Healing Engagement’.
For more information visit Claudi’s website and her Instagram
