Studio Visit: Bianca Baldi
On poetry, lineage, collective and personal memory.
Bianca Baldi, SEA THROUGH SKIN, Until 25th of January at Extra City
Ten years after her arrival in Belgium for a residency at AIR Antwerp, Bianca Baldi (b.1985, Johannesburg) finds herself in what she calls her ‘Belgian year.’ Having established an international career, this period is marked by several exhibitions in Flanders and Brussels: ‘Magical Realism’ at WIELS, ‘Publiek Park’ at Plantentuin Meise and ‘Sea Through Skin,’ her first institutional solo exhibition, at Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp. Her return to Antwerp feels like a full-circle moment. Baldi’s current studio, tucked into the urban fabric of northern Brussels, is compact but bright. The studio’s slight bare-bones state is to be read as a testament to the artist’s increased visibility; a few works on view, others in transit. Notes and images are pinned to the walls, surrounded by books and artefacts that reference Baldi’s ideas and mental landscape, with a new organising structure (a wooden mezzanine) being built in the midst of it all.
Having started out in photography, Baldi’s practice now moves between sculpture, textile, video, audio and text. The studio functions less as a workshop for a single discipline and more as a hub for relations, a testing ground for research, collaboration and improvisation. She considers her work as something taking place collaboratively, with a final exhibition context in mind, the studio space plays a supporting role. She notes, ‘I’m something of a post-studio artist, in contrast to for example a sculptor or painter; someone with a more classic idea of what it means to work within an artist’s studio.’ Yet this ‘post-studio’ relationship to the studio doesn’t render it irrelevant. Affirming the Woolfian notion of ‘a room of one’s own’, the studio space is for Baldi an important antidote to the domestic realm, a space consecrated for (artistic) work. At the same time, she cites Deborah Levy’s more contemporary invocation that ‘even more useful to a writer than a room of her own is an extension lead and a variety of adaptors for Europe, Asia and Africa’, suggesting that for her too, creative work depends on mobility, connection, and the ability to plug into multiple contexts1. In this spirit, the studio for Baldi is profoundly social, the studio is part of the infrastructure created by Level Five, a cooperative studio organisation co-founded by Baldi in 2019 and run by and for artists in Brussels. Within this structure, the studio expands from being a workplace to a social network, where artists see each other and share materials and tools, as well as knowledge and expertise. It’s also a place to invite and receive visitors for studio visits,that probably indispensable art-world social form of meeting. All of this fits seamlessly within the general DIY atmosphere that looms large in the Brussels art scene, shaped by the lack of a city-run studio infrastructure, which requires artists to self-organise and build their own networks of support.
Baldi’s practice hinges on two fulcrums: collaboration and research. Her approach to both is relational, a call-and-response flow which helps her move through ideas, unfolding through encounters with vocalists, fishermen, artisans, historians and scientists. Rather than brooding in the studio, she’s drawn to movement and interactions that motivate or shape ideas. She adds, ‘Ultimately research is collaborative. Even if the sources aren’t living beings, you rely on other voices, on shifting perspectives. I’ve learned that I can invite others into the process, following the logic of performing arts or cinema, where you act from a director role’. This approach to collaboration underpins her video Hear her calendar system a year of thirteen months (2025), developed for ‘Magical Realism’ at WIELS. A poem conducted by the artist was workshopped, interpreted and transformed into a song, together with Johannesburg-based vocalist, composer and researcher Gabi Motuba. Motuba’s voice—simultaneously choral and elemental—guides viewers through the branches of a sycamore fig tree, as if tracing the murmuring archive of its bark. She borrowed the poem’s structure from the classical Greek chorus, alternating between collective and individual voices. ‘We used the text as a kind of backbone,’ Baldi explains. ‘The chorus parts were sung in a deliberately congruent, almost exaggerated version of a choral singing style. While the tree’s voice was layered and circular, without clear beginning or end. It was about giving every voice, human or otherwise, its own sound’.
No ticking clock, no marching years.
I am not image I am form; not stillness,
but movement unseen
roots threading through earth,
yellow branches stretching skyward
I am breath within the cycles of sun and shadow.
My body holds all times,
intertwined past, present, yet-to-come.
The silent shifting of seasons.2
At the heart of this work lies a single image, a sepia photograph of a sycamore fig tree, labelled in handwriting Sicomoro Centenario. The photograph, taken by her paternal grandfather in 1939 during his posting in Ethiopia under the Italian occupation, morphed into a catalyst for Baldi’s thinking about memory, colonial legacy, more-than-human time and silently resilient witnesses. This sacred sycamore fig tree, known by the Oromo people as ‘Odaa,’ is rooted in Ambo, a spa town west of Addis Ababa, where for centuries it has been both a witness and quiet participant, an archive of histories and layered inscriptions. The fact that a tree is silent and will not give us a testimony of its own is important. In a way, it’s an unwitting foil first to the photographer and now to Baldi. Each has seen it as a motif that tells us something about humanity and its motives, but in different ways, with differing effects and intentions. This way of studying (photographic) images opens up the vernacular qualities of a family album, finds affinities and deploys them in a broader shared context or history. A fleeting, personal experience becomes a portal to the historical. Through her collaboration with Motuba, Baldi found an affirming resonance between sound and decolonial strategies. Baldi observes, ‘Gabi approaches decolonial thinking through the body’. ‘For her, it’s about how the voice itself carries history—the way styles of singing are shaped by power, migration, resistance. That conversation felt invaluable to me’.
Text has long been a discreet engine in Baldi’s practice, but in recent years she has become comfortable letting it take centre stage. Her process often begins with writing, for example with poetry or scriptwriting which later evolves into images, sound or sculpture. ‘It follows a similar logic to editing’, she says. ‘Usually, image comes first and sound is auxiliary. But here, the text sets the rhythm like a score. The sound became the structure and the images followed.’ This inversion of the usual hierarchy—sound and text before image—lends Baldi’s work a cinematic elasticity, where duration becomes another medium. Her projects unfold slowly, sometimes over years, accumulating layers of thought and material. The long-term research project ‘Play-White’ (2019–ongoing), for instance, explores racial passing and embodied images. Its namesake publication, released by K. Verlag in 2021, forms part of her doctoral research titled Play-White: Racial Passing and Embodied Images. Baldi’s commitment to duration, to staying with a subject until it reveals its deeper resonances, sets her apart in a time of rapid production.
As part of finalising this body of work, Baldi presents the exhibition ‘Sea Through Skin’, currently on view at Kunsthal Extra City. This solo exhibition brings together pieces that offer an overview of the breadth of this endeavour. A protagonist in this research is found in the figure of the cuttlefish, a cephalopod capable of changing its skin in response to its surroundings. The cuttlefish becomes a metaphor for passing. This metaphor was prompted by her personal history. She discovered that her mother had been reclassified under apartheid, before which Baldi navigated life as a white South-African. The use of allegory and fiction here is essential. ‘It can be violent to look at certain images,’ Baldi notes, ‘so I look for other perspectives and ways to enter a more complex terrain. The sycamore tree and the cuttlefish both offer that: they let me think beyond the human viewpoint’. Through the cuttlefish’s unique physiology—its distributed perception, the ability to sense through its skin and extremities—Baldi questions the primacy of ocular vision and the limits of human understanding. ‘It’s an interesting way,’ she adds, ‘to turn my own assumptions on their head, to think about perception differently, and to accept that not everything can be known from a single place’.
In her studio, time is visible in the shape of stacked archive boxes positioned under Baldi’s desk. Labeled Play-White, Sicomoro Centenario, Zero Latitude, and more, each box contains fragments such as paint swatches, storyboards, contact lists in Ethiopia, notes, fragments of text and textile samples. The accumulated archive is loosely organised per process or project rather than per product or finished work. Even the slight disorder is revealing of the way thoughts move and gradually materialise. Together these traces form a kind of map or genealogy in their own right. This idea of genealogy is woven into various projects, not only in the traditional sense of a family tree as a visual motif, but as a branching system of transhistorical relationships between species, histories and diverse forms of knowledge. The image of the tree returns elliptically across her work: embodied in the sycamore fig that recurs in video, song, drawing, and even the glass-and-steel sculpture The Chorus (2022/2025).
Baldi’s interest lies in engaging with archives and memories that exceed human lifespans. ‘I used to think of myself as an artist who works with photographic archives, but I’ve come to realise that archives are also held in bodies and matter. Inscription lives in more than writing or image making, it’s also in things such as trees, cuttlefish and people’. This shift was in part opened by her encounter with biomythography, the hybrid genre Audre Lorde defined in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). Lorde conceived biomythography as an interweaving of biography, mythology and the graphie (the act of inscription itself). Baldi extends this notion materially in her work, where the inscription of biography or myth need not occur only through text, but may be embodied through people, landscapes and nonhuman life forms. Her earlier video Zero Latitude (2014), commissioned for the 8th Berlin Biennale, that zooms in on the Italian explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza (1852-1905) already gestures towards this expanded understanding. In this silent film, the protagonist is not the explorer himself but a jarring emblem of colonial fantasy, a customised Louis-Vuitton ‘Explorator,’ a traveling trunk that unfolds into a camp bed. This object, belonging to de Brazza, is heavily inscribed with pseudo-scientific ambitions and racialised fantasies of ‘bringing civilisation’ to the African continent.
In contrast to the way Bianca Baldi’s works traverse continents and serve as registers of narrative, histories, and timescales, her studio remains a grounding but permeable space. Fragments fold into each other and research finds it footing before dispersing again. It’s a space for storage, digesting and reading, a hinge between movement and reflection. During a short promotional interview for ‘Magical Realism’, Baldi reflects with fellow artist Elizabeth A. Povinelli on the persistence of material things. Povinelli points out that the tree is an ongoing present. That’s the trouble with thinking about the past and future. These material things are always still there: they outgrow us. Looking back at Baldi’s studio with this in mind, it becomes apparent that it mirrors the artist’s understanding (and manipulation?) of time. Both time and the studio are treated as non-linear, cyclical, serving as laboratory and archive, evolving along with the artistic practice. Inside the studio and through time, especially since having her daughter, Baldi traces with intellectual clarity and poetic agility the complex inheritances—of lineage, collective and personal memory, and the porous boundary between history and myth. Her studio, at once modest and expansive, becomes a microcosm of this process: a transhistorical interface where the past remains present, and where the artistic practice becomes a living inquiry into how knowledge and matter endure.
