Generally, your murals, light or film projections, and live and filmed performances create a visitor interaction with an architectural, urban or natural environment. This interaction opens discourse on how we navigate and sense what surrounds us, as well as how we relate to architecture and others.
How does your background in architecture infuse the intermedia artworks you create - painting, drawing, murals, sculptures, performance and film?
Bunga Yuridespita:
Architecture is the foundation of my artistic practice, though I no longer approach it as the design of buildings. Instead, I use architecture as a way of understanding how bodies inhabit, remember, and emotionally experience space. My work examines architecture not as a static object but as a living condition that shapes perception, movement, behaviour, and identity. Across painting, drawing, murals, sculpture, performance, and film, I translate architectural principles such as scale, threshold, circulation, reflection, and spatial hierarchy into sensory experiences. Rather than constructing buildings, I construct situations in which viewers become aware of their relationship to space and to themselves. Architecture provides the conceptual framework, while the different media allow me to investigate space through multiple forms of embodiment and perception.
BH: What is the creative process by which you create the different media in your interdisciplinary practice?
Bunga Yuridespita:
My process often begins with observation and recording. I collect sounds, photographs, sketches, memories, bodily gestures, and spatial experiences from specific sites. These fragments become material for reflection rather than documentation. From there, ideas move fluidly between media. A sound recording may generate a drawing. A drawing may become a sculpture. A sculpture may evolve into a performance. A performance may then be documented through film, which creates another layer of interpretation. I do not treat media as separate disciplines but as interconnected languages. Each medium allows me to investigate a different aspect of the same question: how do bodies experience, construct, and remember space? The process is cyclical rather than linear, with each work informing the next.
BH: How does one media relate to the other in combination or separately?
BY: The various media function as different perspectives on the same spatial investigation. Drawings and paintings often serve as speculative spaces where architectural forms can become fragmented, distorted, or reimagined. Sculptures bring these forms into physical space. Performance activates them through the body. Film introduces time, movement, framing, and memory. Sound adds an invisible architectural layer that surrounds and influences perception.
When combined, these media create immersive environments. When presented separately, each medium remains capable of expressing a particular dimension of spatial experience. Rather than illustrating one another, the works exist in dialogue, each revealing something that the others cannot.
BH: How much of your practice is digital and how much hand hewn and spontaneous?
BY: My practice exists between digital and physical processes. Digital tools are used primarily for recording, editing, mapping, and translating information. Film, photography, sound recording, and projection allow me to capture and manipulate experiences that are often ephemeral.
At the same time, the physical and spontaneous aspects of making remain essential. Sculptures are often built through direct experimentation with materials. Performances respond to the immediate conditions of a site. Drawings emerge through intuitive markmaking and bodily gestures.
I am interested in maintaining a productive tension between control and unpredictability. Digital processes allow precision and transformation, while physical processes preserve chance, vulnerability, and embodied knowledge.
BH: Your works hint at a loosely woven narrative, within the performance. Their illusionist space, whether in the murals or the use of sculptures over the body in performance, seems to disguise, yet extend the body as an architectural space. How are your works both illusionistic, yet a physically concrete extension into space?
BY: I am interested in the point where perception becomes unstable. The illusionistic qualities emerge through mirrors, reflections, projections, fragmented architectural forms and altered perspectives. These strategies create uncertainty about where the body ends and where space begins.
At the same time, the works are physically present. Sculptures occupy real space. Bodies move through real environments. Sound reverberates through actual architectural conditions. This duality reflects my interest in architecture itself. Architecture is simultaneously material and psychological. It exists as walls, floors, and structures, but it also exists as memory, imagination, and sensation.
My works attempt to occupy both conditions simultaneously.
BH: What is the role of the body, movement and the sensory in your works?
BY: The body functions as both subject and site. Rather than presenting the body as an isolated figure, I approach it as an architectural space that is constantly shaped by external environments. Through movement, the body reveals relationships between scale, gravity, balance, restriction, and freedom. The performance sculptures extend this idea. They operate as wearable architectures that transform the body's silhouette, movement, and spatial awareness. They can protect, conceal, constrain, or amplify the performer.
As the body negotiates these structures, new forms of movement emerge. The sculptures make visible the often invisible ways that architecture influences behaviour. The sensory dimension is equally important. Viewers encounter the work not only visually but through sound, proximity, reflection, and bodily empathy. I am interested in creating situations where perception becomes a full-bodied experience rather than a purely visual one.
BH: How does that relate to the performance sculptures?
BH: You create abstracted architectural spaces and sculptures. How do you, explicitly, and the audience, tacitly, become performers, navigating these spaces, whether within the gallery, or outside the gallery in the settings you choose to film?
BY: I consider performance to extend beyond the designated performer. When I perform, I make visible a process of spatial negotiation. The audience, however, also becomes a performer through their own movement, attention, and decision-making. They choose where to stand, what to focus on, how close to approach, and how to interpret the work.
Similarly, in film, viewers mentally inhabit the spaces I navigate. Through framing and movement, they are invited to experience the environment from a bodily perspective. Whether inside a gallery or within a public landscape, the work creates situations in which all participants become active agents rather than passive observers.
BH: How do you posit the audience in relation to yourself as a performer and your sculptures, films or light projections?
BY: I try to avoid a fixed hierarchy between performer and audience. Instead, I think of the work as creating a shared spatial field. The audience is not positioned outside the experience but becomes implicated within it.
Mirrors, projections, reflections, and spatial installations often fold viewers into the work itself, making them aware of their own presence and movement.
In this sense, the audience occupies a position that oscillates between observer and participant. They witness the work while simultaneously becoming part of its unfolding spatial relationships.
BH: What function does sound play in your artworks?
BY: Sound is a form of architecture. Unlike visual forms, sound cannot be fixed within a single location. It expands, reverberates, and transforms according to the spaces it inhabits. For this reason, I use sound to reveal dimensions of space that are often overlooked.
Many of my works begin with sound recordings collected from specific environments. These recordings function as traces of lived experience and spatial memory. Through listening, I become aware of the social, cultural, and emotional characteristics of a place.
Sound also allows me to translate architecture into temporal experience. While architecture is often perceived as static, sound unfolds over time. It introduces rhythm, movement, atmosphere, and emotional resonance.
In my practice, sound operates as an invisible architecture that connects the body, memory, and environment. It creates spaces that can be felt as much as they can be seen.
