POGO NEL BRODO

In POGO NEL BRODO, Rebecca Solari drops a moshpit in a soup-pot. In the in-situ installation at KRONE COU-RONNE, the figurative broth simmers, neutrality burns to bitterness; silence crusts to salt. Body, class, nation-hood—all boiled, spat, and steamed under pressure. Rebecca Solari (*1996) is a Biel-based Ticino-born transdisciplinary artist. She obtained a master’s degree at the Dirty Art department, Sandberg Instituut, Ams-terdam. Rebecca Solari is a member of the electro-punk duo Crème Solaire (CH) and the music/performance project fulmine (NL). In 2025, she was awarded the Kiefer Hablitzel Preis at the Swiss Art Award for her work Solo Brodo (Primordio e Parsimonia). She was also nominated at the Mobilière Art Price in 2025 and the Swiss Performance Award in 2024. Acte Vie — Scène Réparatrice The family home clings to the mountainside, perched on a plateau suspended between the lake and the peaks. The wind moves freely through it, carrying the scent of spruce and wet stone. Below, the water mirrors the clouds in shifting fragments, like a second sky. The landscape changes as the hours pass, veiled in mist and shifting light. It’s said that on stormy evenings, from the porch, one can glimpse the silhouettes of naked, lost lovers — struck even more by life than by lightning. Violette doesn’t really know what that means, but she chews her chewing gum with the mechanical fervor of her molars. The piece of gum holds within it palpable ten-sions, unspoken words, and a mocking sweetness. With a determined step, she’s about to cross the threshold to join her kin, who have been preparing since morning the legendary soup of the survivors. A recipe passed down from mother to daughter, never shared with a living man. A mysterious brew, that has to be tasted reverently. The kitchen opens onto mossy rocks. The smell of rain and leek lingers. A gray light slides across the tiled walls. Steam rises from bowls on the great wooden table — the air is thick with mist and secrets. This soup is no ordinary soup. It refuses flour, starch, obedient powders, even the comfort of cream. Nothing here thickens the matter artificially. The binding agent, they say, is of another kind — invisible, undetectable to those who don’t taste with their gut. For in the soup of survivors, what binds the pieces together is not a recipe, but memory: fervent impulses distilled, passions reduced to syrup, fevers simmered down until they become tenderness. It is a hand on a trembling shoulder, patience, the repetition of a gesture, faith in the return of taste. Each spoonful reveals a touch of this alchemy — shards of carrot, crumbs of stale bread, tears dried on the rim of the bowl — all melting into one shared texture. Violette knows without saying it: the secret of the soup is that it binds to human warmth, to the persistence of those who, by stirring long enough, keep the world from splitting in two. A clatter of voices and sharp gestures fills the room. The family members grumble, argue, tossing cold words against the vigorous movements that stir and awaken the mystical liquid in the pot. Violette is disillusioned, yet she stands tall. Her shoulders do not bow beneath the visceral remarks of her kin — those beings who form, by the force of both official and unspoken bonds, what one calls family. Dressed in a pink velvet outfit speckled with blue and pierced with electric yellow, she collapses into the sofa facing the mountains. Stroking her lower belly, she thinks fondly of Ormeo — the cherished being who has accompanied her since birth, through fair days and foul. His small tongue, fine as a cocktail pick, tickles her navel from the inside, reminding her he is there. Violette sighs and tilts her head toward the chaotic landscape. Eyes closed, in that cocoon both comforting and suffocating, she recalls the lightning-struck lovers by the shore. Their survival, she realizes, was never a matter of chance, but of a blazing will to live — and live fiercely. Then the rain begins to fall — heavy, thick, almost ani-mal. Each drop strikes the house like a reminder. The wind whistles through the windows, lifts the tablecloths, makes the candlelight waver. In the reflection of the window, Violette sees something move — a shadow, perhaps, or a memory returning with the lake’s tide. She straightens, drawn by a tension she cannot name. In the kitchen, the soup still boils, but something has changed: the smell has thickened, almost carnal, as if the mountain itself had melted into the pot. It smells good. The conversations have fallen silent. Only the bubbling remains — and Ormeo, moving very, very slowly. Violette steps forward. Her mother looks at her, motion-less, a spoon suspended over the steaming liquid. – It’s for you, she says simply. In her voice lies everything: inheritance, exhaustion, transmission, love. Violette looks into the pot. On the sur-face, between the leek rings — always overcooked — and the filaments of seaweed, she thinks she sees a face. Her own, perhaps. Or that of another, older, wilder one. The reflection wavers, warps, then disappears. She closes her eyes. A scent of storm and fish runs through her. When she opens them again, the kitchen is empty. The soup still steams — alive, vibrating. Violette then unders-tands the legend: the lightning-struck lovers did not die — they were revealed. It was the discovery of an inner fire, ready to devour generations of silence. She lifts the scalding bowl to her lips, and drinks. Scccrrrtch. Scccrrrtch. Scccrrrtch. It’s Ormeo, scraping at the walls of her heart. Her aorta swells, her blood races. Orm' moves swiftly, flooding every cell in her body with electric life. The soup is acid and alive. It burns — but it does not destroy. It illuminates. Outside, the storm doubles back, the perfect echo of what awakens within her. The wind, carrying off anger and sorrow, softens the air with a calm melancholy. Did the lovers fly away like simple ashes? Violette smiles, chews her gum one last time — now bit-ter — and spits it, unrepentant, into the overflowing trash. A crack. A breath. A white light. Thunder growls. Lightning spreads across the meadows. The light is there — like an eternal nightlight. Everything dies, vanishes, and finally begins again. – Text by Vanessa Cimorelli and Tara Ulmann Editor’s note: Violette is a fictional character. She was born from three voices that answer, confide, and stitch themselves together in a single breath. This text is freely inspired by the work of Rebecca Solari, but does not describe it — it slips into it, strays away, and returns, like a breath. It is writing with and through her figures, seeking not to interpret them but to prolong their resonance. Violette is neither a personal projection nor the trace of a curator–artist relationship, but a shared space of invention — a place where the images, gestures, and narratives of Rebecca Solari’s work reassemble differently, in an autonomous and porous narration.