Cristobal Bianchi

Research interests

Cristóbal Bianchi works on a series of collaborative and socially engaged practices focusing on the intersection of poetics, memory, and social change. His work combines large-space public intervention, poetry, activism, performance, and time-based work to explore the agency behind our relationships with knowledge, violence, memory, and other possible worlds.

In 2000, he founded the Casagrande art collective in Chile, which has developed a series of editorial and public art interventions in the public sphere, such as King Kong and HH. The Bombing of Poems, one of the collective’s international renown works, consists of dropping one hundred thousand poems printed as bookmarks from an aircraft. This intervention has occurred eight times so far in cities that have experienced aerial bombing during military confrontations, such as Santiago de Chile (2001), Guernica (2004), Warsaw (2009), London (2012), and Madrid (2018). 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Casagrande, in collaboration with the Spanish poets collective pOETAS and the Danish astronomy company Hygge Universe, created Coalsack: Universal Poem to the Cosmos (2022), a collaborative online poem broadcast using a satellite antenna to the Coalsack Nebula, located 600 light-years away from Earth. Bianchi also co-authored with two architects from Universidad de Chile, Fundar (2021–2023), a site-specific installation realized over a wasteland in the center of Santiago. The work explored the relationship between territory, citizenship, and social-engaged- practices in the context of the Constitutional referendum process in Chile. 

 Concerning his scholarly work, Bianchi’s research examines how non-conventional spaces, such as the sky (the aerial view and the atmosphere) and vertical space (the fall and the rise of unusual objects), function as intangible materials of creation. Another relevant stream of his work explores questions about the impact and potentiality of participatory and collaborative art practices that have emerged in public spaces in Chile and Latin America since 2010 to analyze how these practices problematize social and political issues such as inequalities, justice, and exclusions in urban spaces.

He recently published a poem book entitled “Avistamientos” (Editorial Aparte, 2022). His film poemFactories at Sea(2022) has been selected for the Zed Film Festival (Semi-finalist), London International Short Film Festival, and Montreal – The International Festival of Films on Art (2023)https://lefifa.com/catalogue/factories-at-sea

Cristóbal holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in psychology from Universidad de Santiago de Chile, a master’s degree in Interactive Media, and a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London.