About

Carmen Buonanno’s practice investigates the ways in which bodies inhabit contemporary spaces and how social, architectural, and linguistic structures influence their visibility, legibility, and sense of belonging. Working across installation, performance, video, and participatory formats, they create spatial interventions in which everyday materials and objects are reconfigured to question perception, access, and power.

Rooted in a queer and neurodivergent situated perspective, their research considers space as neither neutral nor equally accessible. Personal experience becomes a critical point of departure from which to examine broader systems of normality, classification, productivity, and exclusion. Rather than functioning as an individual autobiographical narrative, it is used to reveal how certain bodies and behaviours are recognized, misunderstood, accommodated, or rejected within social and institutional environments.

Their works often invite the audience to move through a space, interact with its elements, or reconsider their own position within it. Through these encounters, artistic practice becomes a form of political inquiry, capable of exposing the structures that regulate relationships while opening up alternative possibilities for care, participation, and collective belonging.

Buonanno holds a second-level degree in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples, where their initial training gradually developed into an interdisciplinary and research-based practice focused on embodiment and spatial investigation. Their work has been presented in Italy and internationally, including Radical Power at LOTTOZERO, Show the World Your Existence at UnoBis in Padua, We Belong Together in Lithuania and Bologna, and the collective exhibition Cutting Clouds at the MADRE Museum in Naples. They have also collaborated with institutions such as the MADRE Museum and Fondazione Paul Thorel.