Older than the tongues that named me

Bianca Baldi is an artist whose work explores history, meaning, and knowledge production, often through narrative, fiction, and the reconfiguration of historical contexts and events. In this interview, Baldi speaks about her relationship to writing and sound, the documentary image, and narrative. She reflects on how she navigates personal and collective histories of land, colonial exploitation, and belonging through sound and image, temporal constructions, and the embodied ‘voice’ of a sycamore tree. The audio piece features an original composition with choral vocals by Gabi Motuba and sound design by Andrei van Wyk. The composition was workshopped as a sonic dialogue with a poem Baldi wrote in response to a 1939 photograph of the artist’s grandfather in Ethiopia.