ARTIST INTERVIEW
LARA BUFFARD
persona, born in Paris in Lara Buffard is a French Baroque
1973, based between London and Athens. She is a performance artist who incorporates symbolic and surrealistic visuals within her work. She subverts the darkest aspects of life through striking and colourful images, communicating personal and social ideas in playful and powerful acts, transforming the human body into a Raphaelite creature. Website: www.larabuffard.com IG: @lara_buffard_
Tell us a bit about yourself... I'm originally French-born and grew up in Paris, but I lived in Egypt, Switzerland, Canada, and London for seven years before moving in autumn 2020 between two lockdowns to a small island in Greece.
How did you become a performance artist? I became a performance artist by…chance! I worked for ten years in a museum, but when I moved to London, I applied to a call out for a project called "if Tate Modern was musée de la danse" by Boris Charmatz. I was not a dancer and not a performer, but after two days of selection….they selected me. Someone I worked with wrote a performance and sent it to me, and I answered I'm not a performer. He wrote me back," if you are not a performer, nobody is a performer, come on Monday!" Since then, I've never stopped working. The same year I started my own projects. I never thought to be a performance artist, these came to me, and I feel it's where I must be and where I can share and help people reflect and make their own journey. One day, six months after a performance, I Photo by Luis Hartl received an email, and this man wrote me how he finally talked to his dad and told him for the first PAGE 10 | THE PURPOSEFUL MAYONNAISE
