Francesca Bardaro

I’m a Cross-media Artist, Scenographer and Performer whose background is rooted in the field of performance art and new media art. My strongest interest involves, in this sense, all those revolutionary examples of performances whose aim is not presenting a conventional theatrical play because they give space for the merging of different kinds of artistic expressions.The concept of the Self has been at the core of my personal reflection as human being and came directly integrated in my artistic research.In my artistic path, I have been digging into mySelf, both as person and artist. I haven’t been willing to use conventional narrative structures and linear language. Mostly I have been using audiovisual projections and soundscapes that allowed me better than other media to translate the “subtle” dimension of the human Psyche.In the imaginary I created, I have been often working with the bodily sign, both as live presence and remediated in video. In this way, I have been trying to transmit a specific deeper message, expressing the flow of thoughts and emotions, impulses and memories, which may not always appear to have a coherent structure or cohesion. My attempt has been to reflect all the forces, external and internal, influencing the psychic dimension of a character.Body and Psyche have been the main pillars of my artistic productions in which the Psyche is a vibration of the Self, conscious or unconscious, translated through the Body as medium and powerful dramatic element.My concept of “Embodied Psyche”, as a kind of subtle oxymoron of the Self, introduces the metaphor of the Body as an expression and concentration of the psychic dimension in performing arts. The materiality of the flesh and the primordial language of the Body become direct metaphor of the “imperceptibility” of the Psyche. What is clearly visible with the naked eye for its material consistence, it has been reinterpreted to give back the etheric and most hidden dimension of the subconscious Mind, to express the ultimate existential struggle of the human being. The Body as concrete substantial dimension translates its historical “antagonist”, the ultimate impalpable force of the unconscious emotional flow on stage.This particular inclination in my work has been strongly inspired by Samuel Beckett who deals with the Body as dominant element on stage, meant to express the existential depth of the individual, the intense substratum of the Psyche.Through the poetics of fragment in my work, a single part of the Body becomes a “surface” able to tell multi-layered stories. The bodily section becomes a stage in itself. The fragment is a dramatic trigger to discover what is not shown and seen by the naked eye of the spectator. In a sort of inverse relationship, the gradual reduction of the Body greatly magnifies the expressive power of the Psyche. I define this solution as a kind of “tensional dramatic tool” that works as a slingshot or figures as a funnel in which the restricted part looks at the body section, and the wider part as opposite result is the ultimate expression of the Psyche.This poetics leads to some interesting questions: Is it possible to go further, through the processes of fragmentation and reduction to reach a more profound dimension of the Psyche, or the ultimate essence of the Self, the “nothingness” is not completely reachable? Maybe the secret is in striving for the “nothingness” and never reaching it, because here it lies the existential struggle itself.In this regard I challenge myself and other artists and theater makers to further explore this inverse relationship on stage.I suggest: “playing with the magnifying glass and the cutter” to go further exploring the ultimate ontological result.