Sally Bonn

Sally Bonn is interested in writing in all its forms (literary and artistic, critical and theoretical). A lecturer in aesthetics at the Université Picardie Jules Verne, she is also an art critic (Artpress / France Culture) and exhibition curator. She has co-edited two art and literature magazines (Le Salon and N/Z) and directs the Les indiscipliné.es collection of artists’ writings published by Macula. She has published numerous texts in artists’ catalogs and magazines, several essays and a fiction-critique. In 2017 she published Les Mots et les œuvres, Fiction & Cie, Le Seuil. Her latest book, an intimate account of writing, entitled Écrire, écrire, écrire, was published by éditions Arléa in 2022.

 

Sally Bonn is working on a novel, a story of fire, flames and ashes, images and magic, visions and a few ghosts, part of which takes place in Italy, from Rome to Naples and on the volcanoes. In Rome, she wants to immerse herself in the city and, in order to consult archives, come across “spirits of the air”. The novel features a woman photographer who travels to Rome and encounters Ingeborg Bachmann, Giordano Bruno and Francesca Woodman, their traces or ghosts. With Ingeborg Bachmann’s text What I Saw and Heard in Rome as her guide, she wishes to explore the city, watch Giordano Bruno’s distant, fluttering footsteps on the Campo dei Fiori and follow what led to his disappearance in the flames. Consult the archives of Bruno’s trial at the Congregation of the Holy Office in the Vatican. And, because it’s in Rome that she takes some of the most intense photographs of her short life, consult the documents in the Casetti Archives on Francesca Woodman, who inspires the character in the novel. It’s not so much a question of searching for traces of the Roman presence of Ingeborg Bachmann, Giordano Bruno and Francesca Woodman, as of finding them and putting them in dialogue, letting himself be haunted by them and him.