Angiola Bonanni

Mixed materials and etching on tracing paper, 365 x 430 cm.

“A different country. A different language. A different name. A tattoo on my arm that means No God – No Country – No King. Digging down deep to find the roots of my own displacement and the reason why such a large part of my work deals with emigration and immigration, with people who feel displaced. Understanding why one of my projects consisted in inventing a scratch-card game that would send the smiles of the Senegalese in Madrid to their people in Dakar.

After a natural catastrophy one may be forced to leave or decide to stay, but if your physical and social environment have been completely altered you will inevitably feel displaced. Or when a political earthquake shakes the ground under your feet: then too, you are displaced even without having moved. This I discovered when I worked in Oberschöneweide and compared its situation in the year 2000 to the distruction of Pompei.

Displaced by marriage, like all those wives who follow their husbands abroad, displaced by technology, like so many rural communities now in Africa, in America, in Asia, displaced by war, by hunger, by religious or political persecution, by ethnic cleansing or rejection of one’s sexuality: this is the stuff our history is made of. And out of so much pain and so much hope grows our belief in a more tolerant world to come, in which displacement will only retain part of its meaning, that is, going somewhere.”

Born in Rome, Italy. Studied in Rome and Washington, DC, USA. Home trained in art by her father, a painter of the School of Rome, abandons her study of Philosophy to devote herself to sculpture (iron welding and forge, 1963-1970), then to installation and, more recently, video. She has been exploring themes of inmigration and multiculturalism through her series “The Laughs Of The Peoples”. Lives and works in Madrid, Spain.