MANUELA BACHMANN BERNASCONI
I believe that every activity—every profession—is ultimately a pretext for a personal journey. My work is rooted in the possibility to question myself, confront resistance, and explore my limits. It’s through engagement with daily life, with its apparent repetition, that I uncover the transformative potential within each gesture.
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Art and dance are tools that help me investigate who I am and redefine how I relate to the world. What matters is how I do things: the quality of presence I bring to each action.
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Born in Fribourg in 1982 to Sicilian, Greek, German, and Northern Italian roots, I began dancing at the age of five. My professional journey took shape in Italy and France, between musical and contemporary dance projects. In 2010, I encountered Gaga and the work of Ohad Naharin in Tel Aviv—a transformative experience. That same year, back in Ticino, I met Felix, my life and artistic partner—an encounter that continues to reshape everything.
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For the past twelve years, Felix and I have developed a shared creative practice that spans over 20 works and numerous processes. Our collaborative work crosses disciplines: performance, film, site-specific interventions, documentary practices, archiving, festival curation, community-based cultural gatherings, artistic space management, and tools for supporting the independent scene.
Together, we raise four children, who sharpen our understanding of complexity, embodiment, and interdependence.
In 2016, we co-founded Xocolat, an association for creative mobility, and settled in the lower town of Fribourg. Today, we live between Fribourg and the small village of Bedigliora in Ticino.
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Since 2012, I have been developing and transmitting the FLOWA training, a movement practice that explores gravity, functional motion, and somatic perception. FLOWA cultivates vitality, creativity, and adaptability—working with presence, uncertainty, and the intelligence of the body.
Over the years, I have shaped a vocabulary called the FLOWA Paroliere: an evolving organic lexicon that helps access subtle movement qualities through resonant, poetic language., acting as key—compact containers of sensation and intuition.
FLOWA also nourishes my current work in body dramaturgy, which I practice by accompanying both my own creations and those of other artists. It helps me perceive and articulate the inner architecture of a movement or gesture, supporting processes of composition and embodied narration.
I lead FLOWA sessions weekly, in workshops and transmission cycles. My research now focuses on embodied pedagogy, on sensory perception, and on the porous boundaries between disciplines, roles, and lives.
