By Keith Walsh
Born in the town of Turin, Italy, which is perhaps best known for one particular medieval relic, Francesca Bonci found solace as a child spending time with her imagination, filling notebooks and sketchbooks. After high school, she attended the Academy Of Fine Arts, developing skills in video creation and editing. After some unsatisfying time in Lisbon, Bonci returned to creating visual arts and directing videos, first for friends’ bands and finally for artists around the world. Often she collaborates with musicians across genres for live performances, bringing her improvisational skills. VJ. Bonci’s style is often abstract, mixing captured photographic images and video, with layers of light and color, sometimes processed using vintage analog elements, with striking results. In part one of our interview, we cover some details about her experimental approach.
Popular Culture Beat: When collecting media do you rely more on stock images or capturing them with a camera? For example, the close up textures from nature on MINDFRAME EP 15.
Francesca Bonci: The material to create my visual works is made up of many different things: drawings, photographs, magazine clippings, footage that I record with my iPhone or with my Zoom camera: I often make videos of nature while I’m around: sky, plants, glimpses that excite me, people, eyes. Which I will then manipulate and transform into textures and backgrounds for my videos. I like the idea that my emotions of a certain moment are hidden within the textures of my visuals.
Popular Culture Beat: You use images from a cathode ray screens in videos. With all the amazing digital tools, how is it that you feel the need to incorporate vintage analog technologies?
Francesca Bonci: Probably also due to anagraphic factors, I have always been fascinated by a certain aesthetic that is now defined as retro, especially the degraded and colorful one of the 80s-90s, computer graphics, the first video clips, VHS, transmission on cathode ray tube TVs, compared to the super defined cleanliness of high resolution. I use vintage tools together with more modern ones because I really like to experiment and not set limits, because I need to feel completely free to express myself. During the first lockdown I had the opportunity to experiment with some analog instruments for signal manipulation (video synthesizer, analog video mixer), and I understood that they could be an additional tool for image manipulation exactly like digital instruments. Analog allows me to create unpredictable textures, to improvise, to feel the material more when I manipulate it and these analog instruments react better on the cathode ray tube TV screen. My aesthetic was already full of glitches and lo-fi elements, so I just found new tools to do what I did.
‘I have an ambitious idea to take my project to become itinerant around the world: I would like to organize improvisation showcases with artists and places that want to host them in various cities, various countries. To tell my journey as an artist, my love for the world and my vision of art as a foundation for integration and love between people.”
Francesca Bonci
Popular Culture Beat: Growing up in Europe surrounded by all those Medieval and Renaissance paintings, how have those artifacts influenced your approach to creating art? Then there’s the less literal approaches, say impressionism, which I imagine are more of an influence?
Francesca Bonci: Yes, Europe is really steeped in history and ancient art, and we cannot ignore it, but to tell the truth I have always seen these things as fascinating and important, but also as something ancient to start from and then go beyond. Instead of fossilizing there as if it were the only possible art. Surely being born and raised in the old continent has created a certain interest in art that is truly predominant in our culture, but as an artist I feel less classical, more instinctive and I certainly feel more at ease near artistic movements such as impressionism, which is the triumph of color and light. But I believe that the true inner drive was suggested by my oriental origins, which instead gave me a very accentuated sensitivity and a different way of seeing things and nature always in motion, always changing instead of fixed and immobile like ancient art.
Popular Culture Beat: I find it ironic that you’re an image maker from Turin, home of one of the most controversial images ever 🙂 Any comment?
Francesca Bonci: Eheheh. Good observation. By the way, that image has been so influential since childhood. I remember that as a child after the first school visit, I brought home this postcard that represented the iconic image. I kept it for many years as a bookmark somewhere in my bedroom. I found it beautiful, regardless of the religious meaning. Now that you mention it, the Holy Shroud can be considered a silkscreen ante litteram or a projection on a screen hahah.
Popular Culture Beat: I find the The Purple Moon Oneironauts project interesting, as I don’t think many artists have thought about live improvisation of visual art. How many shows of this have you done and how have they evolved?
Francesca Bonci: Thank you! Unfortunately I only did 3 live shows that were still in a very experimental phase and 4 remote sessions during the lockdown. The first live show was inside a kind of cinema theater on the beach in Germany during the ARTLAKE Festival. I was very excited, also because the audience was not selected and I remember that very young kids came in who wanted to party and kept getting up. But I also realized how much I loved it! Another show was in Spain and my performance was projected on a large stone wall in the middle of nature, very suggestive.
‘As an artist I feel less classical, more instinctive and I certainly feel more at ease near artistic movements such as impressionism, which is the triumph of color and light.’
Francesca Bonci
In the lockdown sessions, which I included in a series called ‘Breathing Rooms,’ I invited musician, friends of mine, from all over the world to record their improvisation sessions on the theme of ‘Lucid Dreams,’ the leitmotif of the project and to send them to me and I improvised on their performance. Then each session was streamed by a festival, a gallery or a radio. It was my way of saying that we could survive the pandemic and that we shouldn’t give up! It was really nice.
I have an ambitious idea to take my project to become itinerant around the world: I would like to organize improvisation showcases with artists and places that want to host them in various cities, various countries. To tell my journey as an artist, my love for the world and my vision of art as a foundation for integration and love between people. But I need to find someone who wants to finance it.
Popular Culture Beat: What parameters do you discuss with the audio performers when planning these shows?
Francesca Bonci: In general my approach is always the same, whether I’m working on a video or a visual set for a live show or on my own work. First of all I’m very lucky, that of always working on projects that respect me as an artist. Those who contact me love what I do and trust me so I always have “carte blanche”. But at the same time I am very respectful of the work of others and usually I try to understand it and create something that represents it without overpowering it, rather that enhances it as if I were an added element. So I ask questions, study the concept behind it, try to understand the mood, if I don’t know something I do some research and when I feel I have really entered the song or the project then I start doing some image research: when I’m in timeline I close my eyes and let the emotions guide my visions that I then go on to represent. This approach leads me to bond very much with the people I work with. And I love it. I’m lucky.
Popular Culture Beat: What are some of the challenges of live performance with all that heavy gear that also might be somewhat unreliable due to its antique nature?
Francesca Bonci: I haven’t actually had the chance to do live with analog gear yet. But I have my live setup at home, because I like to have a live improvisational approach when I work. I actually chose to use small analog gear that are all connected to an old Edirol v4 mixer. Probably live I would have all my previously created clips and it would all be connected to a projector. Or I don’t know, maybe I would use some manipulation tools, but I would definitely try first and find a way to make it as reliable as possible, without overdoing it 😉
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