Interdisciplinarity is a series of dialogues between fellows who have spent a period of residence at the British School at Rome.

EPISODE 1 - Bea Bonafini & Eóin Parkinson

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The BSR is one of the many foreign Academies present in Rome, which represent individuals who are emerging in the public sphere and inserting themselves in the city's extraordinary cultural heritage.

Artists and academics live together for several months, establishing not only interpersonal relationships, but often also professional collaborations, thanks to a constant sharing of knowledge that embraces multiple disciplines. In many cases this exchange leads to the discovery of affinities and overlaps among award holders' researches, which relate in new and unexpected ways.

In this series of podcasts, an artist and an academic from the BSR will be in conversation, comparing their research practices and exploring new possible approaches and collaborations.

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Bea Bonafini is Abbey Scholar 2019/2020 at the British School at Rome and Eóin Parkinson is the CRASSH/British School at Rome Fellow 2019-2020. The conversation for Interdisciplinarity will focus on their research interests, which both revolve around the body, its life after death, its formal aspects, the configurations of its dismemberment and dispersion, and then working backwards, to its life before death.

Bea Bonafini works across painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, textiles and installations. Her interdisciplinary practice is inspired by overlaps in ancient and modern art history, human relationships, ritual processes and material craftsmanship. She explores the flexibility of painting possibilities that come by substituting paint and canvas, breaking the boundaries between the viewer and work, expanding and compressing scale to envelop and draw the viewer in. Her work operates on the boundary between functionality and the aesthetic, where its tactility and intimacy is brought to the forefront.

Eóin Parkinson is an archaeologist specialised in the analysis of human skeletons, death and burial in past societies. In his PhD research, Eóin investigated the impact of social and economic change on the human body across 5000 years of Italian prehistory through scientific analysis of human skeletons. His current project, funded by the Isaac Newton Trust, and developed at the BSR and University of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities, builds upon his previous research and investigates the relationship between depictions of the human form and treatment of the body after death through consideration of prehistoric art and burial evidence. Eóin is particularly interested in communal burial - whereby the bones of multiple buried individuals become intermixed and fragmented – and what these processes can tell us about past societies.