Claudia Ponzi: Intimacy and Play in the Digital Age

Claudia Ponzi, born in Padua in 1988, has dreamed of being an artist since childhood. Her practice spans performance, video, photography, fairy tales, and drawings, but she is best known for simple gestures like leaving sunflowers on car roofs to highlight vulnerabilities in the hyperconnected digital era. She treats intimate and sexual spheres with naturalness, without taboos, and similarly investigates identity roles, clichés, and conventions. For Ponzi, emotion is questioned in her work, creating a communication where the head compromises with the heart to expose unknown parts of ourselves. She cites Félix González-Torres, Jiří Kovanda, and Janet Cardiff as guiding artists. Ponzi's work often involves mapping emotions through simple actions; she recalls that during her sunflower installation, passersby understood she was the author, some asking to take a flower, others moving the installation. She aims to create taboo-free realities and utopian spaces, using narrative to shift perspectives. Her cover image for Artribune Magazine #30 captures a fragment of a story collecting everyday secrets. The interview appears in Artribune Magazine #30, with Daniele Perra as journalist.