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Chiara Bersani - L’animale selvaggio, 2024 - Hotel Ladinia, Ortisei

Chiara Bersani, L’animale selvaggio, 2024. Mixed media on Paper. Variable Dimensions. Performance on 31.05.2024. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina 9. Photo by Tiberio Sorvillo

Chiara Bersani is an Italian performer, choreographer and artist. Her works always start out in dialogue with the space where they take place, and are mainly addressed to an audience ‘close’ to the stage, brought into direct confrontation with the artist’s disabled body, which she herself conceives as a political entity. A Gentle Unicorn, the manifesto work of this concept of the political body, starts from a reflection on the mythological figure of the unicorn: a being of which nothing is known, perhaps the result of a misinterpretation of some artefacts produced in India during the Bronze Age, which depicted an ox in profile, in which one horn hid the other. “The unicorn, a creature without a country and without history, has been used and abused by human beings, deprived of the right to speak. Now I wish to compensate it for the wrongs it has suffered. To give it a story, love and a choice,” Bersani says of her work. In one of her latest creations, Deserters (2023), the artist broadened the scope of her practices even further to include the use of drawing and the production of props designed by her.

For The Parliament of Marmots, Bersani has come up with a ‘wild’ version of her performance The Animal. In contrast to the original version – where the artist’s body is displayed on a hexagonal platform reminiscent of the pedestals of circus animals on one side and the plinths of ancient monuments on the other – L’animale selvaggio inhabits the top of a large boulder in Vallunga, a side valley of Val Gardena. Performing her own song to wayfarers as if she had come out of the forest to seek contact with other species, Chiara Bersani confronts the classical dance piece ‘The Dying Swan’ as interpreted by the superb Anna Pavlova, to experience it through her own body and voice. (M.P.)

CHIARA BERSANI

Chiara Bersani (1984, Lodi, Italy) is an Italian performing artist and choreographer exploring the politics of the body and how the images we create interact with society’s narratives. As an activist, she works on the accessibility of disabled artists in the performing arts scene. With her “manifesto” work Gentle Unicorn, a performance included in the Aerowaves circuit, she won the Ubu Award as best performer under 35 in 2018. She also won first prize in the dance category of the Total Theatre Awards on the occasion of Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019. Bersani is an artist of APAP – Advancing Performing arts project – Feminist Future, a project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, until 2024.

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Chiara Bersani - L’animale selvaggio, 2024 - Hotel Ladinia, Ortisei

Chiara Bersani, L’animale selvaggio, 2024. Mixed media on Paper. Variable Dimensions. Performance on 31.05.2024. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina 9. Photo by Tiberio Sorvillo

Chiara Bersani is an Italian performer, choreographer and artist. Her works always start out in dialogue with the space where they take place, and are mainly addressed to an audience ‘close’ to the stage, brought into direct confrontation with the artist’s disabled body, which she herself conceives as a political entity. A Gentle Unicorn, the manifesto work of this concept of the political body, starts from a reflection on the mythological figure of the unicorn: a being of which nothing is known, perhaps the result of a misinterpretation of some artefacts produced in India during the Bronze Age, which depicted an ox in profile, in which one horn hid the other. “The unicorn, a creature without a country and without history, has been used and abused by human beings, deprived of the right to speak. Now I wish to compensate it for the wrongs it has suffered. To give it a story, love and a choice,” Bersani says of her work. In one of her latest creations, Deserters (2023), the artist broadened the scope of her practices even further to include the use of drawing and the production of props designed by her.

For The Parliament of Marmots, Bersani has come up with a ‘wild’ version of her performance The Animal. In contrast to the original version – where the artist’s body is displayed on a hexagonal platform reminiscent of the pedestals of circus animals on one side and the plinths of ancient monuments on the other – L’animale selvaggio inhabits the top of a large boulder in Vallunga, a side valley of Val Gardena. Performing her own song to wayfarers as if she had come out of the forest to seek contact with other species, Chiara Bersani confronts the classical dance piece ‘The Dying Swan’ as interpreted by the superb Anna Pavlova, to experience it through her own body and voice. (M.P.)

CHIARA BERSANI

Chiara Bersani (1984, Lodi, Italy) is an Italian performing artist and choreographer exploring the politics of the body and how the images we create interact with society’s narratives. As an activist, she works on the accessibility of disabled artists in the performing arts scene. With her “manifesto” work Gentle Unicorn, a performance included in the Aerowaves circuit, she won the Ubu Award as best performer under 35 in 2018. She also won first prize in the dance category of the Total Theatre Awards on the occasion of Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019. Bersani is an artist of APAP – Advancing Performing arts project – Feminist Future, a project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, until 2024.