Claudia Borgna’s practice unfolds as an unflinching act of self-examination, where the personal is not only political but sacred, unstable, and in constant negotiation. Moving away from a long engagement with environmental crisis as subject, Borgna turns inward, reframing the terrain of her work as an “inner environment” shaped by memory, inheritance, and the psychological residue of cultural identity. In doing so, she does not abandon nature but absorbs it, allowing the external landscape to mirror an internal one charged with contradiction, vulnerability, and transformation.
Working across digital print, performance, video, and installation, Borgna approaches art as a site of confrontation and care. Her practice is rooted in the belief that conflict is essential to creation, yet she challenges where that conflict is sourced, choosing now to ‘capitalise’ on her own lived complexities rather than those of the wider world. This shift signals a deeper enquiry into authorship and responsibility, where making becomes a process of reckoning with inherited histories, including the discomfort of identity shaped by German and Italian lineage, and the broader implications of cultural and collective trauma.
At the core of Borgna’s work lies a desire to collaborate with what she describes as her ‘wound’ – a convergence of personal experience and wider cosmic forces. Drawing on ideas that span psychology, spirituality, and social discourse, her work positions transformation not as resolution but as an ongoing state of becoming. It is here, within this space of tension and openness, that Borgna constructs a visual and performative language that seeks to hold complexity rather than simplify it.
In this interview, Borgna reflects on the evolution of her practice, the ethics of self-interrogation, and the possibility of art as a space for healing, resistance, and connection.
Are you self-taught, or did you undertake formal artistic training?
With a background in literature, art came to me by way of a more circuitous path. I was in my thirties when I decided to invest in formal academic training. I hold a BFA in Sculpture and an MFA in Socially Engaged Art.
How would you define your visual language or conceptual approach?
I am a conceptual artist. For over ten years, I worked with recycled plastic bags, transforming them into large-scale temporary installations that formed both outdoor and indoor landscapes. The intention behind these works was to highlight the tension between nature and culture, between the readymade and the man-made, and between the natural environment and artificial beauty.
Since graduating from Suzanne Lacy’s Public Practice MFA programme, my work has taken a radical feminist turn, leading into the meanders of my fluid eco-glitch femininity. I am currently searching for possible connections between the conceptual and the spiritual, and I am interested in where and how these two realms meet in art.
Whilst my art practice may well be my own emancipatory process woven into the environmental crisis, I express myself through video, performance and interactive poetry.
Can you describe your creative process from conception to completion?
When working with recycled plastic bags, my practice was site-sensitive and site-specific, informed by the surrounding environment. I would begin by making tests until the concept and visuals came together and blended with the space.
After this initial phase of measuring and developing ideas, I would move to stage two, where I methodically immersed myself in the repetitive and meditative process of moulding the bags, usually hundreds, if not thousands of them, into their assigned shapes until I reached my goal.
The installation of the bags on site was the next phase, followed by thorough documentation through photography and/or video.
At the moment, I work mainly on the computer. I work with words, repetitions of words this time, trying to distil, declutter and find meaning, both semiotically and visually. I am attempting to understand and illustrate the invisible parts of myself set against my cultural, social and emotional conditioning, investigating my internal landscape.
Experimenting with words and arranging them into images, which I then print on photographic paper as though they were self-portraits, has become vital to me. I realised how much of my life happened unconsciously. During this process, I also explore the performative aspect of words.
One of my main concerns is how best to share them with an audience, and how that audience can become a participant in these works of words.
Does narrative, symbolism, or storytelling play a role within your work?
I think all my work is driven by an underlying narrative. If before it was unconscious and mainly intuitive, I am now working on bringing this thread to the surface.
These narratives dwell in my dualities: my relationship with ancestry, with nature, with culture, and with how I experience and perceive the world around me.
Which artists have most influenced you historically or contemporarily, and why?
Artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Simone Forti, Suzanne Lacy, Eleanor Antin, Adrian Piper, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andrea Fraser and Gloria Anzaldúa have been important academic sources of inspiration.
I draw great strength and courage from their work, which continues to guide my practice. In particular, Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit and Cut Piece, Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, and Alison Knowles’s Make a Salad are important points of reference for my Interactive Poems.
Even though it took me a while to fully understand and fall in love with it, I was trained as a conceptual artist, and Fluxus has been one of the main influences on my work.
What personal, cultural, or environmental influences shape your practice?
I have been deeply influenced by British culture, where I encountered art and attended art school. For many years, I lived and worked in London.
The United States has also been influential, particularly Los Angeles, where I completed my MFA and lived for several years with my Chicana, Los Angeles-born spouse.
I was raised by a single mother who is German, and my relationship with her has had a profound influence on me and my work, as has the heavy karmic inheritance of her family, which I am only beginning to understand and recognise in the subtle ways it has been passed on to me.
Then, of course, there is Italy, where I was partly raised and where I currently live. This has been another major influence, if only for my desire to break away from its deeply conservative and suffocating patriarchal culture. Despite all its natural beauty, I often feel stuck and resentful towards a culture that has not been particularly supportive of artists, women, queer people or personal growth.
I left home at eighteen to return to Hamburg, where I was born, before later moving to London.
Where is your studio based, and how does the space inform your creativity?
I work from home, mostly on my computer, which can feel limiting. However, as the sole caregiver for my mother, who has Alzheimer’s, I am grateful to be able to keep my practice alive in any way I can.
I dream of having a dedicated studio space where all my art materials, currently scattered everywhere, can finally come together.
Do you have any rituals or rhythms that anchor your studio practice?
Art is always on my mind. Ideas appear in the most unexpected moments, often early in the morning when I am half-asleep or during meditation.
I have piles of written ideas, concepts and potential projects that I often forget, but what matters most tends to remain. It acts like a natural filter, and I follow that thread of instinct and limitation.
I love research. Having a clear overall view of what surrounds me is important, as is diving deep into rabbit holes. I often get lost in that process, I cannot help it, even if it leaves me feeling overwhelmed and confused.
I realised that this can also be my way of procrastinating: doing something while avoiding the real action of focusing and getting into the substance of the work.
That is when rituals become useful. Before I begin serious work on a project, usually one tied to a deadline I have set for myself, I first need to clear and clean my space, if not the entire flat, which is very small.
Only then can I sit and concentrate. Eating, drinking tea, walking, and showering are all small rituals that help me refocus and broaden my perspective.
What bodies of work or projects are you currently developing?
Seeking the opportunity to fulfil all my potential, my work is currently walking the line of interdisciplinary mixed-media practice. Creative writing, relational aesthetics, social engagement, poetry slam, performance art, spoken word, concrete poetry, visual conceptual art, digital collage and animated lyrical prose all come together in an experimental project I call The Interactive Poems.
At the core of these works lies language, alongside a drive for playfulness, inclusivity and, above all, collective healing. I started this project in 2021. Prompted by the death of my stepfather, I began a journey of self-discovery, reframing my perceived realities.
Inspired by feminist theory, intuition, observation, holistic psychology and therapy, astrology and spirituality, and by my desire for liberation, I have been researching authenticity, only to discover my emotional codependence, a conditioned behaviour that prevents individuals, and therefore society, from fully blooming and evolving.
Currently searching for possible connections between the conceptual and the spiritual, I am interested in where and how these two realms meet in art. Digging for my own tailor-cut form of social engagement, a more intimate, personal and crafted one that operates from the inside out, I have created a visual lyrical exchange that reflects my human need for spiritual, conceptual, personal and political exploration.
Rethinking art as a sacred ritual rather than another commodifiable good, I feel that with The Interactive Poems I am beginning to find my core voice, one that I am eager to research, experiment with, develop and share, and also define as its own genre under the name of Healing Engagement.
How do we de-objectify the word and express emotions through embodied language that is not coloured by societal conditioning? The Interactive Poems hold a contemplative aspect when exhibited as a conceptual self-portrait in the form of a print. Its relational aesthetic is activated when performed with a public through the audience’s participation in the words, which can happen silently or spoken aloud.
Looking at the connection between bodies, language, and inner and outer truth, The Interactive Poems are performative aesthetic exercises that explore how words embody the meaning of the body, or how bodies embody the meanings inherited through words passed down to us.
I invite the audience to participate and become part of my process of liberation by helping me clear the emotional clutter made of fears and anxieties. Interacting with the poems, the audience becomes a momentary community that helps and is helped in return.
By taking turns in exposing vulnerability, the community supports the artist in a process of field exploration. Thanks to a group of people willing to take risks, the catalyst for Healing Engagement lies in creating a situation that presupposes compassion, connection, curiosity, community and ceremony.
In a time when words have been taken for granted, become void of meaning, and their energetic power ignored or dismissed, voicing pain transformed into words and images can bind us back into a space of truth and authenticity.
Where can collectors encounter or acquire your work?
I have a website for my recent works: www.claudiaborgna.org and for my previous installation work with the recycled plastic bags: www.claudiaborgna.com.
I am not particularly focused on selling work to private collectors. I would rather earn through teaching, running workshops, public commissions and performances.
