Lives in between The Hague and Amsterdam
Website https://cargocollective.com/bernicenauta
How do you describe your own art practice?
It’s a multidisciplinary practice, I do mostly drawing/painting and filmmaking, and sometimes sculptures and site-specific-installations. My practice is very narrative. I love stories, and the techniques that help to build them, especially the idea of montage.
In case of my paintings, I am preoccupied with the interaction between them. I feel like my paintings only start to make sense when you see them in relation to the other paintings, then a subtle iconography unfolds. I often approach the entire painting as a character. In painting, I make no difference between the canvas, the suggested space in the painting and figures that inhabit that space.
Since 2019 I do works about the concept of the double or doppelgänger. It began with ‘Hello Echo’, an exhibition at 1646 in The Hague, in which I made a copy of the building, inside the building. And in recent films under the title ‘Cast Non Appearance’ I’ve been thinking about how montage can provide two people to become one person. An actor and a stunt double are edited together in a timeline, through which two people become one character. I tried to transpose this phenomenon out of the realm of cinema into everyday life; and asked myself the question: what would life be like if I had a stunt double? So I set out to find my ‘missing’ stunt double. I returned to spaces that could hold this magic realist figure. In the end I did not find her, but I found an actor who would play my part and I descended into the role of my own stunt double.
Which question or theme is central in your work?
I am working a lot with the interplay between the surface and what lies underneath it. An example is human identity. I’m thinking about the presentation of self in everyday life. So a recurring question to me is are we persons or are we actors of persons? To give an example, the other day I learned something interesting. How in the 1950’s the concept teenager was kind of invented. Not like it didn’t exist before, but it became a marketing-target for (technological) companies at the time, and thus was cultivated as an identity marker.
The past years I’ve been working a lot around the figure of the doppelgänger, and related themes such as imitation, the copy and appropriation. Another recurring trope in my work is the interplay between a character and a space, such as architecture or a landscape. I approach space as being (a part of) a character.
What was your first experience with art?
For me first came music and films. As a young teenager together with my friend we would go to the video rental shop. We would rent DVD’s and watch a lot of films together. We were fans of for example the films Lila 4-ever, Tillsammans, Space Odyssey, Broken Flowers, Lost in Translation, Me and You and Everyone we Know and Naissance des Pieuvres. What I like is that looking back we were really into coming-of-age films, while being teenagers. I still am actually. One day I want to make a coming-of-age work.
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
It’s just living the life I think.
What do you need in order to create your work?
Time and space and materials.
What work or artist has most recently surprised you?
Elene Chantladze, Jing Ningning, Clarice Lispector.
