Camilla Pontiggia is an artist and filmmaker based in South Africa. Her transdisciplinary mode of work cuts across film, sound, installation, textile, performance and writing (incl. prose, poetry and screenplays). In her most recent work Pontiggia takes as a departure point her experiences of growing up between South Africa and Italy. Guided by the viscerality of these formative experiences, she unravels her personal encounters with coloniality as a (white, Christian) woman, thinking with and through gut sensations and intuitions in search of alternative forms of knowing, being, doing, and resisting.

This search for creative alternatives at the intersection of art and social issues is a recurring theme in Pontiggia’s work. Her video art has featured in theatre productions that explore the African Diaspora and forced migration, as well as live art that reflects on indigenous knowledge systems; her short films and documentaries have tackled injustices such as human trafficking, gender-based violence, and policy challenges that black and brown women face in the South African corporate and entrepreneurial space; and her performances have tackled issues of race, gender, and class at the heart of gentrification and systemic injustice. Often using a narrative approach, Pontiggia’s work seeks out ways of embodying a decolonial and black feminist praxis in her work and in daily life.

“Things I Found Nelle Viscere” – which translates from the Italian to “Things I Found Inside the Bowels of Being” – is conceptualised as a performative exhibition space in which to activate and embody the research it is born of. Taking as a departure her life experiences between South Africa and Italy, Pontiggia looks to her personal encounters with coloniality and to the colonial histories of the two countries in which she grew up in an attempt to unravel the western blueprint handed to her by her ancestors.

In the live performance of the show Pontiggia turns artworks into objects that tell colonial histories and sharing stories with the audience over food, she digs through everything that sits inside her viscera. As histories are made visible, edible, and vulnerable to disruption, a blueprint is slowly turned on its head.