In her work, Carolina Bonfim explores the codes of gestures and body representation, as well as the overlaps and shifts between the gaze and physical presence. Through projects on a very human scale, the artist creates scenarios and situations that allow for a direct relationship between artist and spectator, as well as the questioning of both roles.
With a background in performing and visual arts at the UNESP Institute of Arts in São Paulo, Carolina Bonfim (São Paulo, Brazil, 1982) settled in Barcelona to pursue a master’s degree in Artistic Production and Research at the University of Barcelona. The observation of the differences in body movements, especially in dance, between both places led her to research, which resulted in the works Here, Please (2012) and Remake of movements in night clubs (2012). In the first of these, she accurately reproduced the movements of some choreographies related to pop culture, after a thorough and systematic study of them. In the second, after carefully observing the dance movements at the Moog club in Barcelona, the artist mimetically reproduced them as a way of establishing a dialogue with other people.
Both projects are direct antecedents of Balmes 88 (2014), a performance carried out by the artist in the spaces of a venue at number 88 on Balmes street in Barcelona, which had been the after-club of the same name and was being transformed into the spaces that would house the Cyan art gallery. In these spaces, still under construction, for four Fridays in the months of April and May, the artist dedicated herself to dancing alone to some of the hits that were undoubtedly heard during the previous life of the venue. The action, which could only be seen from the street, turned potential spectators into voyeurs. As an act of resistance, Bonfim recovered the past of the space and showed how changes in uses are nothing more than the result of urban transformations and the power mechanisms that dictate them and that, directly and indirectly, condition certain forms of use and behaviour.
Interpersonal relationships and the rethinking and interference between the roles of artist and audience, as well as the reformulation of the notion of performance, are constants in Carolina Bonfim’s work. A notable example is Corazón 190, a performance for a single participant that was presented in the context of the Barcelona Production 2013 competition by La Capella. The number 190 in the title refers to the frequency of heartbeats that mark the threshold of a heart attack. In Corazón 190, Bonfim alludes to the tachycardia that can be caused by tension or uncertainty. The performance is not carried out by the artist but by the participant who decides to sign up and obey the instructions that are guided by SMS through Las Ramblas in Barcelona until they end up in an apartment in the Raval district where no one is waiting for them. The willingness to assume that the role of the audience does not have to be passive or comfortable implies, as a spectator, the acceptance of a transfer of control of the work, the opening to the unexpected, the submission to follow instructions, to enter the fictional space of another or to the possibility of being another. When entering a private space that belongs to another and in the absence of this one, the spectator finds himself with some photographs that show him making the journey that he had made only a few minutes before, that is, they confront him with the evidence that he had been observed, watched and controlled. In the tension between different opposites (presence and absence, public space and private space, identification and resistance), Carolina Bonfim proposes performance as the means to rethink the self, the relationship with others, the construction of personal and interpersonal space or the mechanisms of transfer of control.
[Published in xtrart, 2014]
