This extremely disturbing examination of rape and femicide by Brazilian performer Carolina Bianchi begins with a lecture. She presents her thesis like a PhD student at a viva, a stack of paper beside her on the desk. It’s an academic start that finishes with a journey into hell.
Bianchi explores four paintings by Botticelli that are inspired by a story by Giovanni Boccaccio. The pictures depict Nastagio degli Onesti, who, after being spurned by his lover, witnesses a woman in the forest being chased down by a knight’s hounds. The knight then eviscerates the woman who had rejected his advances. Nastagio conjures up the horrific scene in front of his own lover to force the marriage that she had hitherto declined.
It’s a history repeated through the centuries, and if Bianchi is to understand it, she must repeat it, too. She moves on to a more recent event from 2010. Brazilian goalkeeper Bruno Fernandes das Dores de Souza ordered the murder of his girlfriend, whose body was fed to his Dobermans. Incredibly, he only served a few years in prison and continues to play football.
But the one story Bianchi can’t let go of is of Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca, who, in 2008, hitchhiked through the Balkans and the Middle East dressed as a bride. Previously deciding that she would never refuse a lift from a driver who stopped their car, Bacca is picked up by a man in Turkey who then raped and murdered her.
For their own safety in such a violent world, female performance artist are expected to present their work in the safety of a gallery or a theatre. Bianchi lists performers such as Marina Abramović and Gina Pane. Although there is truth in what Bianchi suggests, the fact that someone raised a gun to Abramović’s head in 1974’s Rhythm 0 inside a gallery makes that iconic performance even more shocking. However, there’s a sense that Pippa Bacca should have never taken such risks – her greatest being the fact that she thought people were essentially good – in the outside world.
Bianchi then prepares to reenact a performance by the artist Ana Mendieta, who died at the age of 36 in 1985 after falling from a window 34 floors above the ground. Controversially, her husband was acquitted of murder. In Rape Scene of 1973, people were invited to view her bloody, tied-up body in her apartment. Bianchi tells the Queen Elizabeth Hall that she will swallow rape date drugs and that she will fall unconscious. We’ve already seen her grind the drugs into a vodka tonic, which she now sucks on with a straw. Chillingly, these drugs are nicknamed Good Night, Cinderella in Brazil.
What happens after Bianchi is rendered unconscious is the stuff of nightmares. The company of Cara del Cavalo comes out on stage to remove her body and place it alongside the murdered remains of other women. A car appears on stage, perhaps the car that picked up Pippa Bacca in Turkey. Tellingly, its licence plate reads FUCK CATHARSIS. Bianchi is not trying to find any resolution to the stories she has recounted, or to another, more personal story that slowly emerges. Catharsis suggests an end to terror, a tidy way of wrapping things up, a healing. Instead, Bianchi picks at her wounds until they bleed again.
The Bride and The Good Night Cinderella is not an easy watch and runs, sensibly, for 210 minutes without an interval like a 1990s piece of endurance art. Questions of consent and complicity come to the fore as Bianchi’s body is moved around the stage and manipulated in terrifying ways. Bianchi says that to sufficiently describe the violence of the world, especially the violence towards women, we will need a crueller language. Her show comes close to finding this.
Runs until 18 September 2025
