Bianca Bondi. Scrying in Astral Ponds

Using salt water—Bondi’s signature material—the artist crystallises several ponds with immersed copper coins, flowers and shells, while the lush surrounding vegetation witnesses their salty mutations. However, the crispy silence is deceptive—although invisible to the naked eye, intense material interactions are taking place among the objects. These invisible yet transformative relationships among humans, chemical components and plants are key to Bondi’s practice. Vivid floral compositions created by French florist Guillaume Lanier, with chemically-infused changes in colour and flexibility, linger between the natural and the artificial, between the living and the inanimate; a suspended vegetation that is protected from the draining hands of time by its molecular resilience.

Yet time is non-linear, and past and future coexist in the same room—one only needs to learn how to look closely to see it. The dreamlike installation Scrying in Astral Ponds is an instrument for such learning. It is inspired by the occult practice of “scrying”, an ancient art of divination that uses a reflective or illuminated surface to catch visual glimpses from the past, present or future. The salty water ponds in the installation are precisely those surfaces—portals to reflect upon the possible upcoming scenarios that will develop depending on our relationship with ourselves, with nature, with others. Is it care that we will choose? A cure? Resilience? Disregard? Destruction?

Bianca Bondi (Johannesburg, South Africa, 1986) lives and works in Paris. Bianca Biondi's multidisciplinary work activates or elevates mundane objects through the use of chemical reactions, mainly involving sea water. The materials she works with are chosen for their mutation potential or their intrinsic or symbolic properties, always with the aim of encouraging experiences that transcend the visual and defending the life of the material in question. Interconnectivity, transience, and life cycles and death are strong undertones of her work. Passionate about environmentalism and occultism, Bianca Biondi inserts them into multidisciplinary, transformative works in which the aura of the objects is key. The poetic results, often produced in situ, are closely related to the places where they are intended to exist.