VALENTINA GERVASONI
In your works, there is a common tension that crosses the threshold where elements transform each other, where even the invisible and the inanimate become companions in relationship; a form of listening that crosses matter, voice, places, and bodies—whether it be a crystal of salt or a breath of air. Your works seem to ask what remains, or is transformed, when we recognize a certain vitality intrinsic to matter, even in that which does not breathe. I would like to start from here—from this idea of relational matter and how it resonates with you. Could you talk about how, in your practices, the transformation of matter becomes a way of thinking and feeling the world, and perhaps even of caring for it?

BIANCA BONDI
For me, matter is never inert—it is constantly responding, remembering, absorbing. Each material I use, whether salt, metal, textile, water, or other, carries an energy, a history, and a potential for transformation. Working with them is a form of dialogue, an act of listening. The studio or site becomes a kind of ecosystem in miniature where reactions unfold oxidations, crystallizations, evaporations, the matter effectively breathes, sweats, contracts, seeps—conditions that I guide but never fully control. It suggests that vitality is not reserved for the living as we define it, but circulates through all things. Salt, for example, breathes with the humidity of the room by pulling any and all moisture toward it, and then contracts and dries when this moisture dissipates. In this sense, each installation is not fixed; it continues to evolve, sometimes quietly disintegrating or growing long after it has left my hands.
There is also a political and ethical dimension to this way of working. Allowing materials to act and transform on their own terms is a gesture of humility—a refusal to dominate. It’s an attempt to unlearn hierarchies between human and non-human, between culture and nature. I think of the work as a collaboration between substances, spaces, and presences that coexist for a moment in equilibrium. At the same time, there is something ancestral in this approach. Many ritual practices, from diverse cultures, recognize the agency of materials—that the earth, minerals, or water are not passive, but participants in the shaping of reality. Transformation, in this sense, becomes not only a visual process but also a spiritual one, a way of caring for what is fragile, unseen, or overlooked. So when I work, it is not only to make an image or an object, but I imagine a sort of manifestation of sympathetic magic, a way of reestablishing connection through resonance. Each element, each gesture, is charged with intent, echoing the belief that actions performed on one substance can ripple outward, affecting another. Within this space, the boundaries between the physical, emotional, and metaphysical dissolve, reminding us that everything, visible or not, participates in the same living continuum.

ANNAMARIA AJMONE
For me too, matter is never inert. It was illuminating to recognize that we, as human beings, are also composed of various material parts: the minerals of our bones, the metal in our blood, the electricity of our neurons. What has been more difficult to conceive is that these materials themselves might be vital and self-organizing.
I think the idea of an intrinsic vitality within matter becomes more plausible, and more comprehensible, when I look at it on a very broad temporal scale, evolutionary rather than biographical. In this shift of temporal thinking, I sense a vast potential for understanding, but also for imagining. This combination, suspended between science and literature, creates an unstable place where one can continuously tremble, lose balance, and begin again. Revisiting Bianca’s words, I was especially drawn to your statement about installations that are never fixed for you. This strongly echoes my own practice. I like to think of choreography as a precarious art, one that is constantly changing, never the same. And if we shift our attention away from the centrality usually given to the moment of performance—or the “live”—we can begin to perceive its precariousness. The performance does not end in the hic et nunc of shared presence; it returns through incomplete, repetitive, non-original, fragmented, and partial eruptions. It leaves no traces because it is already a remainder and leaves what it is. It simply appears, it carries the copresence of past and future. It is an unstable space crossed by people, ideas, bodies, identities, and objects.
And when you talk about salt continuing to evolve after it has left your hands, I can say something similar happens to me, though in a different way. There is a second phase of the performance that begins after its first “staging”: it often happens that I disown the work as if I were rejecting it, wanting to distance myself as much as possible. I can’t look at photos or videos. And yet, in that stretch of time, I slowly begin to understand what I’ve done. Then a new phase begins, one of renewed love, of crossing through it again. Over time, the thoughts of those who have inhabited the work evolve, while those of the audience begin to enter and intertwine with ours. It’s strange, because I create something that I usually cannot see except through other media. Since I am almost always the performer in my own works, I can only rely on the experience itself. I would love to understand how it works for you. How do you relate to this, on an emotional level? What kind of affective relationship takes shape for you?

BIANCA BONDI
I had never thought about the experience of always being the performer of one’s own work and then reviewing the experience as a witness. Actually, as the performer you experience and “channel” the work, and if you choose to reexperience it by watching the documentation this engages your sense of sight in a completely different way. Hence I completely understand the distancing aspect. It is almost as if the firsthand experience is something raw, almost sacred, and not meant to be revisited from the position of someone now looking from the outside in, having already known the mysteries of its creation. As for myself, on an emotional level, I am very aware that how I create art is a consequence of my own psychology. I grew up watching the women I was imprinting off of—my mother, grandmother, aunts, etcetera—not being able to control the events of their lives and how this made them obsessive compulsives in the aspects where they could gain control: their bodies, the state of their homes, their children. So creating work that is about letting go and trusting the slow performance of the materials themselves is a way for me to break the cycle.
After all these years, I’ve come to realize that as artists we often begin with an idea—a spark of intention, something we wish to express. Yet it’s only long after a work comes into being, sometimes years later, that its deeper purpose starts to unfold. Why that piece needed to exist—and why it could only have taken form in that particular way, at that particular moment in time. Is there a specific work of yours that taught you something unexpected or resonated in a surprising way?

ANNAMARIA AJMONE
Yes, I also feel very much in tune with you on this—revealing oneself in a time that’s different from the time of creation. This often happens to me when I’m already in the midst of a new process. There’s always a sense of dissatisfaction with what I produce, as if each time I have the feeling that I’ve somehow failed a little. Perhaps it’s precisely from the desire to redeem myself from that feeling that a new path begins. I wouldn’t say there is a specific work of mine, but certainly the encounters and exchanges with the people with whom I share my experiences are always the occasion of deep questioning, fragility, and discovery. The last performance I did, I pianti e i lamenti dei pesci fossili (The Cries and Laments of Fossil Fish), which premiered in 2024, is a real leap into the unknown. It’s a work in which I use my voice for the first time, and the voice takes on a central role. Driven by the desire to engage with something unfamiliar, something I don’t really know well—a new instrument—my goal was to disrupt the structure of practice I had built over years of work and in which I had grown comfortable. All of this coincided with the birth of my daughter, Liliana, which completely upended the way I organize my life as well as my work in the studio. For me, this work signifies a shift from a “before” to an “after.”

VALENTINA GERVASONI
Annamaria, you mention that the birth of your daughter has disrupted your daily routine and your way of being in the work. What is striking is that, in your words, time does not appear as a simple practical variable, but as something whose very quality has changed. We live in a world that quantifies everything—days, processes, productivity—and in which “good time,” the time needed for metamorphosis, tends to be the first to disappear. How do you protect the kind of time that allows real transformation, that lets you be permeable and receive what might generate new work? And how does this new relationship with time influence the relationships you build—with the people you work with, with the audience, with the materials themselves?
Bianca, you describe how letting materials act—allowing them to grow, transform, and sometimes slip away from your intention—is also a way of interrupting emotional inheritances tied to control, to managing the unforeseen, to vulnerability. In your practice, it is not you who “takes care” of the material; rather, the material itself, with its slow timings and autonomous reactions, reeducates your gesture and redefines your attention.
What kind of temporality emerges for you within these processes that require waiting, holding back, not intervening? Is it a time that shifts your sense of what it means to “let things happen”?

Thinking about both of your reflections, I’m reminded of Jane Bennett’s notion of dividual subjectivity, developed through her reading of Whitman: a porous, permeable subjectivity—not indivisible but open—that is always constituted in relation: to materials, energies, bodies, spaces, and the rhythms of the living. A self that absorbs and releases, that is formed situationally through reciprocal influences. I wonder whether this idea resonates with you.

BIANCA BONDI
Jane Bennett’s writing has been important for me. I suppose the temporality that unfolds in my processes is one that continually slips away from the usual metrics of productivity or control. When I work with materials that insist on their own pace—salt crystallizing, metals oxidizing, liquids evaporating—I’m asked to inhabit a kind of expanded, elastic time. It’s not passive waiting, but a form of attending; holding myself back just enough so that something else can come forward. In the studio I’m reminded that my role isn’t to take care of the material; it’s almost the reverse. The materials, through their slow insistence, teach me how to be more porous—how to relinquish control without withdrawing my presence. They cultivate a different form of vigilance, less authoritative and more companion-like. So yes, a shift happens. “Letting things happen” becomes an active proposition rather than a resignation. It’s a shared temporality, where I am not the only agent shaping the outcome. These interactions form a rhythm that interrupts linear time and replaces it with something cyclical, tidal, relational. In that sense, Bennett’s idea of dividual subjectivity resonates deeply. My practice often feels like a continual dissolving of boundaries: between self and environment, gesture and reaction, intention and accident. The self becomes a site of exchanges—absorbing, releasing, leaving traces, being altered by encounters with matter. This permeability isn’t just conceptual; it’s felt in the body, in the slowness of observation, the gift of subtle transformation—but transformations and movement continue nonetheless…
The works that come out of this are less like fixed objects and more like temporary agreements between forces—including my own. And maybe that is the kind of subjectivity I’m learning to inhabit—one that is situational, responsive, and shaped through the quiet negotiations with materials that have their own forms of life.

ANNAMARIA AJMONE
The gestation time of a performance is long—sometimes unfolding over years—yet fragmented into very brief encounters and exchanges. There are residencies in which people meet, live together, share houses, work, and spend convivial moments together. Then come long pauses, during which one may pass through other residencies, other projects. The body and the mind layer practices and information that blend into life, into the home, into everyday routines. Then people meet again and attempt to return to what had been put into play the previous time—one week earlier, one month earlier. What needs to be repeated is not written down or, if it is, it exists only as words that mark something to be remembered. The only true reference is the memory inscribed in the body from the previous encounter. The only archive of dance is the body itself. This makes it impossible to keep things intact; instead, it requires accepting continuous mutation and transformation, their being partial, similar, and at the same time dissimilar. The time in which things transform is part of the writing of dance. Dance is made with other bodies that are living through the same process; the overall balance is constantly shifting. Everything is always unstable.
Recently, I performed a piece I hadn’t brought to the stage for a long time. During this time, many things in my life had changed I myself had changed deeply—my energy, my strength, my drive. I had only vague memories, and I worked to make them as precise as possible. Then, during the performance, the body, almost autonomously, reentered the score I had once given it. But it was a score saturated with an energy that no longer belonged to me; I felt as though I were constantly chasing a state that could no longer exist. It was a beautiful sensation of discovery. I understood that I needed to inhabit that work in the same way, but differently—to place within that structure the energy I have now and allow it to expand, without trying to reproduce something that has already transformed. The material had already made the leap; I processed and understood it only a moment later. This is why I love dance so deeply, because it continually speaks to us about everything we are immersed in.

VALENTINA GERVASONI
Do you recognize in your practices a ritual dimension, a space in which something passes through you, in which life seems to migrate from self to self, in which transformation takes place without fully belonging to anyone? A ritual to be understood not as the mere repetition of actions or gestures, but as something that emerges in the encounter, traversed by enchantment, wonder, and joy, and by sensations shaped as much by attraction and fascination as by fear, even by disorientation.

ANNAMARIA AJMONE
There is a place of encounter—a place that shifts, that is not familiar, yet one we slowly make our own, arranging it little by little, as you would when preparing your room. We repeat certain actions, while continually inventing new ones. It is a journey toward a destination that is more or less known, shaped by a time agreed upon from the start. Within this space-time, we repeatedly set in motion a shared secret; we add another layer, attempting to make the invisible visible. Our practice unfolds within the realm of atmosphere; perhaps vision is not the only sense we should trust as spectators.

BIANCA BONDI
Yes—I do recognize a ritual dimension in my practice. Not rituals that I perform per se, but rituals that I encourage, either through the materials themselves or through the activation of an installation—sometimes through gestures akin to scrying where the public is invited to experiment within the context of the installation. The artwork is a space where conditions for transformation are set in place. Transformation does not belong to anyone; it migrates, seeps, oxidizes, evaporates, crystallizes. What you describe—life moving from self to self, a transformation that is shared yet ungraspable—resonates strongly with what I understand as sympathetic magic. Not magic as illusion or belief, but as a logic of correspondences, the idea that things act upon one another through resemblance, proximity, and contagion. Materials remember what they have touched. Substances continue to act long after the human gesture has withdrawn. In many of my works, salt, copper, water, perfume, flowers, bacteria are not symbols but active agents. Salt attracts moisture; copper oxidizes; metal stains surrounding surfaces. These processes operate autonomously, according to their own rhythms. My role is closer to that of a facilitator—setting conditions, assembling affinities—and then allowing matter to behave. This is where ritual emerges: not necessarily through repetition, but through attention, waiting, and exposure to forces that exceed control. In the Bloom vitrines, for example, salt crystallizes around organic remnants—shells, flowers, coral—slowly petrifying them. The objects appear preserved, yet are in fact unstable, sometimes crumbling over years. This fragility is essential. The vitrines function like alchemical chambers or reliquaries, where preservation and decay coexist. There is a quiet violence at work, but also care, a tension between enchantment and erosion. Similarly, in works involving oxidized furniture or domestic architectures, such as Silent House, the home becomes a site of slow ritual dissolution. Furniture climbs walls, bleeds onto floors, as if memory itself had become liquid. Here, sympathetic magic operates between architecture and body: dampness recalls breath, corrosion mirrors exhaustion, mineral deposits evoke traces of former lives. The domestic space is no longer private or stable; it becomes porous, haunted, disoriented. I am also deeply influenced by spiritual and occult traditions that understand matter as alive and relational: alchemy, animism, certain strands of mysticism, and prescientific pharmacopeia. The pharmaceutical cabinet recurs in my work not as a symbol of healing, but as a site where care, control, toxicity, and desire intersect. Remedies can become poisons. Ritual, for me, is not about mastery or transcendence. It is about order and slowness—attention—and exposure. I am interested in moments where materials seem to act with us or against us, where authorship dissolves, and where transformation happens quietly, without spectacle, without ownership. If there is enchantment in my work, it lies precisely there: in allowing life—mineral, vegetal, atmospheric—to bloom, to transform, to migrate from one form to another, passing briefly through the human before continuing on its own path.