Clara Begliardi Ghidini

12/09/2025

Inbetween Antwerp and Ravenna

Absent Presence of Present Awareness (Clara Begliardi Ghidini, 2020)

Video, 00:59m, 352 × 288p, Stereo

As photographer Francesca Woodman did among the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the dusty Roman palaces, Clara speaks of herself, of the present and the past, of those intangible powers between sensitivity, vulnerability and perception. Her work is placed in the interspace between physical and metaphysical existence, between material and transcendental existence. In the 2020 video work Absent Presence of Present Awareness, we find a first visual experiment representing her emotional response to moving across different nations since childhood.

Clara is a video artist and emerging curator based in Antwerp. As a multimedia artist with a Fine Arts degree from the Arts University Bournemouth in the United Kingdom, she draws inspiration from the introspective nature of human existence. Through her audiovisual works, she experiments and transforms abstract ideas into layered imagery that stimulates and unsettles the senses, often creating spaces where the boundaries between physical and metaphysical experience blur.

Her works, such as Absent Presence of a Present Awareness and Numb, invite viewers into disorienting yet reflective experiences that question memory, estrangement, and the metaphysical dimensions of human existence. Alongside her artistic practice, Clara is deeply engaged in curation and archival research. With an MA in Archiving, Presentation, and Preservation of the Moving Image from the University of Amsterdam, she specializes in exploring how archives and collections can be critically re-examined through artistic, theoretical, and co-creative approaches. Her curatorial interests focus on experimental and hybrid practices that merge preservation and presentation, often through counter-archives, found footage, and the video essay. Currently, she is working at ARGOS (Brussels), where she is researching and programming an exhibition on Vidéographie (1976–86), a seminal Belgian television program preserved in Sonuma’s RTBF archives.

Art and Biology

Numb (Clara Begliardi Ghidini, 2021)

Video, 04:10m, 320 x 240p, Stereo

Her urge to understand the effects that the constant displacements during her childhood and adult life have had on her, have led her into inquiring further into the human being. Both in a biological and physical sense and an introspective and psychological realm. After graduating, Clara went on to study Fine Arts and the University of Bournemouth. Although she was fascinated by various subjects, she was always inclined into the arts. In order to enojy school, she began to dig deeper into more rational and mathematical subjects, trying to understand and like them from a more personal and deeper level influenced by her relationship with her older sister, a doctor, led her to approach a scientific reading of her own emotions. The biological processes, which replicate in constant cycles within the body, become for Clara a mirror for understanding the emotional and psychological processes she is experiencing.

“I loved studying biology at school. It was a subject that I found myself reading about and studying over and over again. It is the first subject that pushed me into sketching to grow understanding and a subject that just made a lot of sense to me as a kid who was often lost in their thoughts and emotions.”

The artist starts from dividing her own thoughts and emotions, then putting them back together through a process we could at times define as surgical. To do this, she sometimes draws inspiration from her own dreams, other times from period films, such as Dalì’s Un chien Andalou. The result is a cyclical creative process born from phases of introspection and set on a scientific method of hypotheses, deductions and research, consisting of three main phases: poetry, poetry transcribed into video or audio, and layering. The soul of Clara’s works therefore has an entirely surrealist force: a stream of consciousness meticulously transcribed, photographed and recreated in the form of video art.

The creative process

‘Everything psychological is biological, everything biological is psychological.’

The creative process behind Clara’s works is based on a manipulation of time and image. Frames per second are modified, stretched or compressed, until generating an altered perception: time appears distorted, fragmented, almost suspended. This distortion is not just a technical effect, but becomes a poetic language, capable of evoking the subjective and irregular perception of emotional experience. The predominant aspect, however, is the technique of layering: overlapping video and words, color inversions, experiments with multi-screens and digital editing. The works fully exploit the technological potential of the new millennium, such as Adobe software. And yet, despite this digital imprint, the melancholic aura running through Clara’s works places them in a suspended dimension, in a “grey zone” not attributable to a precise time.

This tension between technological modernity and temporal indeterminacy functions to engage the viewer in a journey of introspection: the work is not a simple aesthetic exercise, but opens an inner space, that of the artist herself, which the public is invited to enter. Each work is intense and reinforced by a carefully chosen soundtrack, ranging from background murmurs to Nel blu dipinto di blu.

In general, Clara creates a relationship between how an individual experiences or processess emotions and enzymatic functions: a slow, layered action that transforms and reworks without destroying, but rather separating, reducing and multiplying into smaller products. Thus, images become organic matter, continuously altered by the artistic gesture. This happens in Numb, presented as the concluding project of the VVV Residency. This work reflects the artist’s interest in psychological anthropology, visually exploring the symbiotic relationship between biological and psychological mechanisms. The video draws direct inspiration from Tusalava (1929) by Len Lye, of which it incorporates the first half: an abstract animation is born from the intertwining of inner research and experimental visual language, setting itself as an investigation into perception and the management of emotions. To this matrix is added a deeply personal dimension: a stream of consciousness, transcribed and then translated into stop motion format. The choice to fragment thought and render it as animated image conveys the sensation of an ongoing process, similar to the biological one. Hence arises the hypothetical metaphor running through the work: the way we process emotions is comparable to the functioning of enzymes, which activate transformations without annihilating the starting matter.

To this dimension is added another level of hybridization: the recorded performance, the extracted frames and subsequently painted, are reintroduced into the video, creating a continuous interplay between different media. Painting, performance, animation and video art blend into a single visual body, where superimposition does not cancel but enriches, multiplying perceptive and interpretative possibilities.

In this way the work is configured as an open process, rather than a concluded result: a visual and emotional laboratory in which time, body and memory are reworked and returned as both physical and transcendental experience.

Why is it always in black and white?

The chromatic palette, characterized by the absence of bright colors, plays a key role: gray or earthy scales.

“I love an avantgarde look, a film like texture. But, knowing a lot about film and respecting the polarity of this medium compared to video, I am in no way trying to recreate it. My love for video art was pushed even further by works such as 'Outer Space' by Peter Tscherkassky, of which I wrote an entire thesis about. He is a wizard at appropriating found footage and turning film against itself through very matherical and surgical methods using film.”

Removing color is therefore helpful in making the works more understandable to the public and in ordering the introspective messiness of thoughts. In general, black and white works are “more digestible.”

Personal Footage and Found Footage

Another key aspect of Clara’s work concerns the use of archival footage. Personal and found footage appear from the very beginning in her works. For her, their use is a way of investigating the past through the lens of the present. This allows previously invisible gaps to be highlighted.

Truth or Illusion? (Clara Begliardi Ghidini, 2021)

Video, 04:20m, 852 x 480 p, Stereo

In the work Truth or Illusion?, a commissioned work for the Beyond and in Between Exhibition in collaboration with the European Space Agency, the relationship between fantasy and reality is explored precisely through the synthesis of the artist’s personal footage and found footage in an attempt to appreciate and question technological developments made since the first missile launch in 1957. In this case it is interesting to note how once again the focus of the work is not on its meaning in itself, but on its function as an analytical tool through the gaze of the artist and the viewer.

The latter sometimes finds himself in the position of inspecting and sometimes of being inspected. In Body Language (2022), the artist presents a series of “x-ray” videos. The work is installed in such a way as to create a play of gazes, in which the viewer simultaneously sees the face of a man and the body of a woman. The round shape of the screens, recalling the petri dishes of optical microscopes, transforms bodies into objects of observation. This formal choice recalls the historical tradition of visual and medical control over the body, particularly the female body, and prompts a critical reflection on the relationship between power, science and representation. The viewer is caught in an ambiguous mechanism: while watching, they are in turn watched, and become part of the surveillance system staged by the work. The visual language adopted by the artist oscillates here between intimacy and clinical detachment, showing how the body can be at once living presence and radiographic image. In doing so, Body Language questions the boundaries between visible and invisible, between identity and anonymity, suggesting a broader reflection on how contemporary society constructs and controls images of female and male bodies.

To conclude, Clara Begliardi blends in her video art layers of different languages: historical citation, visual experimentation, psychological introspection. The tension between biology and psyche, between collective and individual memory, thus becomes the core of the aesthetic experience, keeping the artist’s mind as the fil rouge.

Artist’s comment:

Clara leaves no comment for now. She lingers instead in gratitude for the presences that remind her of an origin - when art first unveiled itself as a threshold and a tool that brought one closer to themselves. A moment when one could surrender to the infinite cascade of introspection and consciousness, unclouded by the laminated image of the weight of reality that fractures our inner worlds.

Clara's website

IG:

@clarabegliardi & @clarabegliardi.art

@ari4fritta