Renaté Bianca

By Renaté Bianca

Thinking about activism, it strikes me that macro-level changes need to be underpinned by microlevel changes in order for those changes to be healthy, durable and sustainable: fundamental change on a societal level needs to be underpinned by personal change.

Personal change that is engaged in voluntarily comes from personal agency, not from external pressure or threat from the collective.

In a very real way such personal agency is the driver of social change.

My creative practice is fuelled by a strong passion to see this agency, personal sovereignty and freedom, restored in individuals. I believe that ultimately individual agency leads to a place of personal wellbeing. It is this wholeness and wellbeing that I pursue in my artistry: micro-level wellbeing that has macro-level on-flow effects.

There are many factors that contribute to the erosion of a person's agency and sovereignty in life, which is why artistically I deliberately travel to dark and difficult places; we cannot find freedom, collectively or individually, without identifying what ties us in knots.

This pursuit means that my artistic activism exists on a very personal and intimate level. I am an artist activist in the way that a microbiologist might be an environmentalist.

Of course I believe in the possibility and potential of personal change, without which my work might be seen as needlessly challenging. However, I am confident that even if my artistic activism were to miss its immediate goal and fail to contribute in a meaningful way to the recovery of personal agency, there would still be a level of comfort derived from being artistically seen, known and understood in dark and difficult places.

I aim for songs that liberate, but if they fail to liberate, my hope is that they empower and provide comfort.
 

Renaté Bianca
26 September 2024