Chiara Bersani
∗1984, San Rocco al Porto, Italy
Chiara Bersani is an Italian performer, choreographer and artist. Her worksalways start out in dialogue with the space where they take place, and are mainlyaddressed to an audience ‘close’ to the stage, brought into direct confrontationwith the artist’s disabled body, which she herself conceives as a political entity.AGentle Unicorn, the manifesto work of this concept of the political body, starts froma reflection on the mythological figure of the unicorn: a being of which nothingis known, perhaps the result of a misinterpretation of some artefacts produced inIndia during the Bronze Age, which depicted an ox in profile, in which one hornhid the other. “The unicorn, a creature without a country and without history, hasbeen used and abused by human beings, deprived of the right to speak. Now I wishto 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 artistbroadened the scope of her practices even further to include the use of drawing andthe production of props designed by her. ForThe Parliament of Marmots, Bersanihas come up with a ‘wild’ version of her performanceThe Animal. In contrast tothe original version – where the artist’s body is displayed on a hexagonal platformreminiscent of the pedestals of circus animals on one side and the plinths of ancientmonuments on the other –L’animale selvaggioinhabits the top of a large boulder inVallunga, a side valley of Val Gardena. Performing her own song to wayfarers as ifshe had come out of the forest to seek contact with other species, Chiara Bersaniconfronts the classical dance piece The Dying Swan as interpreted by the superbAnna Pavlova, to experience it through her own body and voice.
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