Barbara Bernardi creates atmospheres by collecting and producing images, sounds, moments and voices and editing them to shape new stories. Born in Padua, she studied film directing in Milan and earned a Master in Fine Arts in London. She was a director for an Italian music TV channel and a video artist for theatre plays and exhibitions before moving to Berlin in 2008 to dedicate herself to art and video-making. Barbara’s work has been exhibited and screened across Europe and has won some prestigious awards in Italy. She often collaborates with other artists like filmmakers, musicians, dancers and poets. She was the Gil Artist Residency artist in Akureyri in January 2017.
A poetic landscape:
the re-construction of natural-emotional spaces through images and sound.
I like creating visual poems with my composed images and sounds in order to build new atmospheres which can tell stories.
My intention is to devise a unique space which offers a reprieve from the routine of everyday life, and a poetic and meditative experience.
I am especially interested in and inspired by my personal perception of reality.
I observe reality through my camera, not objectively, but rather filtered by my emotional state. I let myself be inspired by the surroundings, soaked in my fantasy and my feelings. I collect traces which are connected to my emotions and which I see through my emotions.
What I see and hear resonates like an echo through my body, influenced by my past, my fears, my expectations and my dreams. I look at natural or urban landscapes before me as if in a fairy tale, full of figures and symbols.
These images make up the metaphor of my story, of my poem.
I assemble them and then I work on them. I change them, edit them, and finally, they become my own intimate language.
The subjects of ‘island’ and of ‘water’ are recurrent theme in my work as places of a primordial experience; the purpose is to establish an emotional dialogue with the viewer, beyond physical time.
The soundtracks of my video installations and video poems, consist of either voices, speaking in different languages or improvised music, or both, which opens new windows of meaning in the dialogue with the images.
In each work I create a new island of images and sound where the viewer is invited to jump in and let himself to float along.