Carolina Bianchi

Portrait

Writing, knife-throwing, sex with ghosts and buildings, conjuring archaic images, reviving performances, linguistic obsession, telepathic communication: this is how Carolina Bianchi outlines her work, portending the violent yet sensual collision it has with the audience. The Porto Alegre-born, Amsterdam-based theatre director, performer, and author is consistently concerned with a reference to the reality of history, researching and “resurrecting” female deceit and desire as well as transcending a rationalistic intellect – when bodies suddenly speak with all their fluids and convulsions, when Satan seizes their language.

Together with her collective Cara de Cavalo (“Horse Face”), based in São Paulo, where she previously worked, Bianchi is taking the true story of a female performance artist as a starting point in “A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela” (“The Bride and Good Night Cinderella”, premiering in July 2023 at the Festival d'Avignon): Pippa Bacca was murdered on 31st March 2008, on her way from Italy to Israel to stand up for world peace. Joined by her colleague and fellow artist Silvia Moro, she had set off from Milan on 8th March of the same year in white bridal attire that she sewed herself. At the end of their journey as “Brides on Tour”, for which they hitchhiked across the Balkans towards the Middle East, they wanted to exhibit their wedding dresses soiled during their travels. But this did not come to pass: near Istanbul, Bacca was raped and strangled by a truck driver. “A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela”, the first part of her “Cadela-Força” (“Bitch Strength”) trilogy, revolves around this crime, so symbolic in all its tragedy – the kind of femicide that happens every day, uncounted, all over the world. It is perhaps her most risk-taking, threatening work yet, in a career that is far from lacking these qualities. 

“If, in my earlier works, the spectre of violence against women was always present, here and now, I dare say those words clearly and, for the first time, get straight to the heart of the matter,” says the artist in conversation with Moïra Dalant of the Festival d'Avignon. Following her intense research on sexual violence and femicide during her two-year master's degree in Amsterdam's DAS Theatre programme, Bianchi is putting herself at the centre of the danger, not only to pay tribute to Bacca’s counter-gendered performance by “resurrecting” it, but also to let the experience of violence break into the theatre space in a hyper-real way and by using her own body. In the course of the performance, she swallows a “good-night Cinderella” sleeping pill – a date-rape drug regularly used against women in nightlife – and is knocked out, incapacitated live on the stage.

With this radical yet consistent development, the Brazilian takes her output to a new level. Her previous piece “Lobo” (“Wolf”, 2018), for example, also performed with the collective, is based on sexualised violence against women, echoing Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, to juxtapose lust, violence, and female power in a kind of performative painting, accompanied by passages of text by Emily Dickinson and Mary Shelley. “I can't imagine life without men,” says Bianchi, who performs in this piece with at least 16 mostly naked men in an eruption of sweat, saliva and sex scenes, “and at the same time, I feel the desire to cut off their heads.” In “The Magnificent Tremor” (2020), again with Cara de Cavalo, Bianchi further pursues the potential for resistance to patriarchal role attributions by surrounding herself with witches, vampires, ghosts, and bloodthirsty countesses, inspired by horror films, de Sade, and Woolf's “Orlando”, among other influences. In a moist mash-up of historical facts and fictions, they lustfully appropriate the attribution as “monstrous” as it undermines their controllability by “the men”.

In her repertoire, which spans the stage, screen, and written word, Bianchi continually pushes the limits of what is tolerable, with the help of (art) history, as this is precisely what characterises female realities to this day. By repeatedly incorporating ambivalent moments of transgressive desire and shifts in power, she makes it clear that there is no such thing as linear history(s), impressively explaining with rich imagery why the fight against patriarchal inequality is not won so quickly.

Sonja Eismann
Translation: Josephinex Ashley Hansis