beatrice donda
portfolio
Beatrice Donda
Born in Trieste, on the border between Italy and Slovenia, she carries Italian, American and Austrian blood. Before the pandemic Shanghai was the place she used to call home, even before New York was her place in the world, now she lives between London and Tuscany, halfway between one of the most frenetic cities, full of life and stimuli and the Italian countryside surrounded by nature, with moments of infinite silence, scents and traditions. Two places that in different ways deeply inspire her projects.
Beatrice's means of communication has always been food. Her life has always revolved around it almost like an obsession since childhood. It is an element that has always distinguished the artist, through which she has always felt the need to express herself and the means through which she now realizes her art.
Her projects have the intent to express her inner world through edible elements. To bring her thoughts, her ideas, her reflections on the outside world, not only making them visible to others but also assimilable, digestible, almost like a medicine.
Project: Bread and Butter
Category: Edible installation and performance
Year: 2022
Location: London, Uk
Material: bread, butter, cotton
Ironic ode to a country and it’s queen
butter candles slowly melt on bread…
After spending one year struggling to return to China post covid, the artist changes trajectory. She is paradoxically welcomed in a land that was closing its borders thanks to Brexit.
"Bread and butter" is an ironic celebration of a country towards which the artist has always had mixed feelings. She reveals this dichotomy in an installation in which the bread, modeled in monstrous shapes, is intertwined but at the same time opposed to the butter candles which, when lit, bring light into the darkness, radiating the entire room.The performance involves the lighting of candles by the artist in a moment of ritual similar to a religious act. A moment of ironic thanks for the opportunity received by the queen.The candles slowly melt on the bread. The butters, all of different flavors (anchovies, breadcrumbs, cherries, peanut butter and chilli, lemon zest and herbs, red wine and shallots) are intertwined with different types of bread (black garlic, corn flour, carnation and cayenne pepper, chestnuts, mixed seeds, white strong) creating a multitude of flavor combinations. Visitors are invited to take large knives in their hands and cut their own slices of bread, covering them with butter to create their own combinations and coming into direct contact with the work. Touching the various elements with hand, ingesting them, thus absorbing the meanings they carry with them.
Project: Not a cookbook
Category: Performance
Year: 2023
Location: Trieste, Italy
Material: crab, eggs, milk, cigarettes
Do you remember the mud
I ate
on your hands
on leather
I was a child
I like the smell of smoke
milk was dripping…
This performance represents the work behind the book written by the artist: "Not a Cookbook" first presented in Siena and then at MLZ Art Dep Gallery in Trieste. The bed as the center of the performance, where everything happens, where the book was written. The artist puts herself in correlation with the elements that will then be found in the pages of her poetry.
1 hour in which the artist is locked in a room showing her stream of consciousness in the creation of a piece of art while the public voyeuristically through a big window can observe her actions listening to her recorded voice playing on the background.
Project: Shibari
Category: Edible installation
Year: 2022
Location: London, Uk
Material: chocolate, rope
What if chocolate had its perversions too?
Would it like to be tied up?
From object of pleasure to subject of pleasure. Chocolate is placed at the center of its own sexual investigation. It is no longer "used" to satisfy human pleasures but it is itself to discover its own perversions. Modern Western thought has accustomed us to believe that only what we perceive is real, that the human being is at the center of the world. Taking up Graham Harman's provocative theory of object-oriented ontology, chocolate thus has for the first time the opportunity to question what actually causes its own excitement.
The installation is made of chocolate stones tied to the ceiling with a rope recalling the ancient art of Japanese tying: the shibari. The artist imagines the chocolate enjoying a moment of excitement, of harmony with its cellulose, its fats, its starches. During the exhibition, however, the spectators bring the chocolate back to the state of anthropocentrism by eating it. Chocolate returns therefore after a brief moment of freedom again from subject to object.
Project: Pattern in the pigment for Dezen Dezen
Category: Edible installation
Year: 2022
Location: Trieste, Italy
Material: dough, edible color, potato
“Pattern in the pigment” tells the passion of two young people who decide to take over an ancient craft. The founder's grandmother had been producing women's scarves since 1938, which from Zagreb were distributed throughout Eastern Europe. Due to the conflict that struck the former Yugoslavia, the business lost much of the market leaving hundreds of magnificent wooden screen printing unused, so the they decided to reuse them, giving them new life, reinventing the tradition of scarves and transforming it into a contemporary product. The visitor finds himself interacting with the work by reproducing the process of making the scarves but using edible dyes and edible materials such as shortcrust pastry and potatoes. Materials that want to remember the modest origin of this fascinating technique.Once their own pattern has been created, visitors are invited to taste their own small works of craftsmanship to absorb the history of this ancient company, it’s tradition and the love of this incredible family.
Project: bread on the canal
Category: performance
Year: 2022
Location: London, Uk
Material: water, flour, salt, yeast
Description: disruption of the kitchen space
Project: yolk
Category: photography
Year: 2021
Location: London, Uk
Material: egg yolk, sugar
Description: can dripping yolk make you drip
FUTURE PROJECTS
madre posidonia
The ancient Greek myth tells that Zeus, king of the gods, in order to establish who had the right to rule Attica and to give the name to its capital, launched a fight between Poseidon and Athena. Whoever gave the inhabitants the best gift would have won. Poseidon struck the rock with his trident and made a horse jump out of it, a wonderful animal, unbeatable in running, powerful in battle. Athena, on the other hand, beat the ground with her javelin and made a small plant with silver leaves sprout which soon produced small dark berries: the olive tree, a noble and precious plant. Women voted for Athena and men for Poseidon but, being the women in majority, Athena prevailed. Poseidon was furious, flooded the whole of Attica.
Posidonia oceanica forms extensive seagrass meadows around the Balearic Islands, known as underwater forests, with high biodiversity of species and their role in the ecosystem is of great importance.
Seagrass meadows provide shelter for many species; produce oxygen on a daily basis, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and creating tons of biomass per year. Likewise, they act as barrier reef structure, which, although they are scarce today in the Mediterranean, have a high importance and longevity.
Posidonia blooms in Autumn and produces floating fruits in spring, commonly known as sea olives.
GENDinER
The categories of men and women are now obsolete and no longer represent today's social complexity.Human nature, however, leads us to want to classify each one in one of the two genders even unconsciously, this creates discomfort for those who feel they belong to another gender or do not want to identify themselves in any category. From this comes the concept of "feeding one's curiosity from the body of others", therefore having to necessarily understand what is under the jeans or under the t-shirt in order to be able to give a label to the subject in front of us without any permission or need to do so but only out of mere curiosity. The installation will therefore lead people during the exposition to carry out this act in a conscious way, thus literally eating from the body of others. To feed on their reproductive organs which will be represented in edible materials.
AMULETI
“Amuleti” was born from the idea of combining the world of food with the rich spiritual world of four incredible sports: skate, surf, ski and snowboard.Two worlds that usually never come close. Two worlds that for some reason have always remained distant and no one has ever had an interest in associating.From this union comes the idea of interviewing those who live these sports on a daily basis and tell their story. Giving shape to their thoughts through amulets that will represent each of them. Amulets that the artist will shape in order to convey to those who will taste them the most intimate stories of these athletes, all selected because they are among the most eccentric and influential including the Olympian Leonardo Donaggio (Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics) and the world champion of SuperUnknown Giorgia Bertoncini (SuperUnknown 2019).More than 300 edible amulets will cover an altar, ready to be eaten by the people present in order to absorb the stories they bring with them.
A trilogy born in the months lived in Shanghai. The first book "Not a cookbook" tells the stories of the people closest to the artist and the most important places she has visited. Each story is written as a recipe without actually being a recipe. "A cookbook" instead is in effect a cookbook, a large collection of recipes written over the years in various trips and found in family books, while "Not" is a story that will be published in a single copy, a scandalous, erotic and sarcastic book.
NOT A COOK BOOK
A COOK BOOK
NOT
BOCCA
The artist is working in collaboration with a silversmith to create a collection of food shaped cutlery in silver
Personal and collective exhibitions:
Pearls for Constantin Thun - Youth Club, London, 20 May 2018
Bread and butter - Canalside Studio, London, 8 November 2021
Into the woods - Blu di Prussia, Trieste, 27 November 2021
Pattern in the pigment - Dezen Dezen Studio, Trieste, 12 December 2021
Shibari - Canalside Studio, London, 27 April 2022
Randagi - De Art , Trieste,10 May 2022
Comptium - Art Space, Trieste, 20 July 2022
Not a Cookbook - MLZ Art Del Gallery, Trieste, 22 June 2023