Fabrice Bernasconi Borzì

Fabrice Bernasconi Borzì is an Italian-Swiss artist, born in Geneva in 1989. Since 2018, he has been living and working in Catania.
For the artist, this move represents a kind of backward journey, the opposite of that undertaken by many of his peers: in moving from Northern to Southern Europe, he seeks to rediscover a cultural otherness, peculiar to his places of origin, which is functional to his artistic work. This national and existential dualism, this dual citizenship, with its resulting contradictions, underpins the balanced conflict between forces that his work seeks to express.

The formal elements he uses are often simple, minimal, or stripped-down, almost subverting the “usual” through a paradoxical and at times provocative language rooted in Dadaism, which does not shy away from quotation and appropriation. The intention is clear, as he develops a series of questions about the very meaning of “making,” its implicit conceptual assumptions, and how all of this is interpreted within the current art system. From these premises, he reflects on human beings and their alienation from existence, in a dichotomy that politically encompasses the tradition of conflict between productive and social forces against hegemonic and capitalist powers.

His work seems to embody a kind of philosophy of idiocy, whose linguistic structure—often precarious forms and improvised assemblies—is the result of an oxymoronic “discipline of the provisional,” reminiscent at times of a certain intellectual détournement from the Situationists, seen through the procedural perspective of rigorous and methodical behaviorism. A contradiction in terms, which leads him to work, with obstinate discipline, on complex concepts such as loss, precariousness, and resilience, hidden beneath the expressive device of barely concealed irony. Under these conditions, nihilism and history, defeatism and teleology become one, producing a form of active and catalytic resistance. This is a conjunction of philosophy and revolt, of belief, subversion, and belonging. Politics and poetry manifest in the raw gesture of maintaining balance despite the evident facts.

Fabrice Bernasconi Borzì considers himself “a sponge and a thief of ideas, but one who works hard to truly be what he is.”