• BODY MATTERS: CO-CREATION RESIDENCY (2022)
We Exhibit presents
in collaboration with Live Art Cultures, Studio Contemporaneo and EntrAxis e.V.
BODY MATTERS: Co-Creation Residency
C32 performingsartsworkspace, Forte Marghera, Mestre-Venice
May 31 - June 10, 2022
Live performance sharing open to the public: June 9, 2022, at 07:00 pm, Warehouse 30, Venice-Mestre (IT)
COVID-19 has drastically changed the way we tell, interpret and communicate our stories to others. After two years of inactivity compelled by the pandemic, the Venice International Performance Art Week returns with a residential project, which arises from the need to re-form a temporary artistic community in a physical space similar to a blank page. Sara Simeoni, an artist participating in the residency and performer in Carolyn Carson's dance company, states: it is a project that assumes the performative space as a place of precious vulnerability, and hesitation, but also of the dynamic opening where memories and processes of transformation entwine.
Body Matters is a moment of sustained encounter where different artistic researches combine with performative responses to confront the emergencies of the present. The idea also arises from the desire to further qualify the C32 artistic space as a performative interface for the coagulation of inclusive, expansive stories; an open space that functions as a social-narrative incubator wherein performative systems and methods are intertwined in the search for new and unconventional expressive approaches.
CO-CREATION EXPERIENTIAL RESIDENCY: BODY MATTERS is born from the urgency of gathering, reuniting, sharing and forming a temporary artistic community in a physical performance space akin to a blank page. A space to inhabit, a quantifiable, transformable container of everchanging identities. Also a shelter, a research hub activated by human bodies’ performative responses to past, present, and future challenges. The basic idea of the co-creation experiential residency is to approach C32 performingartworkspace –home of the Educational Learning Program of the Venice International Performance Art Week since 2013– as a narrative interface of stories that flow, unfold, blur, collide, merge, coagulate and expand. A performance space designated for inclusion, innovation, and diversity generating questions, alternatives, and possibilities for more sustainable living and art-making. Speculative thoughts become easier to access when they take root in real-life possibilities and become tangible facts. However, they may remain aleatory when incorporated into digital constructs, although allowing a great sense of freedom, some of them inevitably go adrift. With the opportunity of sharing a performance space in an intensive residency period, we continue holding performance and storytelling as our treasures, for they translate the essential human capacity to read and construct reality. We wish to imagine the performance space as an open box, functioning as a social-narrative incubator where performative systems and methods entwine, putting their sustainability and meaningfulness to the test, perhaps to devise new, unconventional approaches to the normative. To reprise collaborating in proximity, re-amalgamate, and re-aggregate as a collective of performers and multimedia artists, is attempting to envision potential habitats for gathering while reflecting on issues crucial to our contemporaneity:
How do we approach a performance space again collectively, in proximity?Is it the same or an "out-of-place" space?Is it a space like before or somehow "other" perhaps disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory and yet transforming?Which future environments are we expecting to inhabit artistically?What are the narratives, tools of experience-making and sources of inspiration we seek?How do we foresee sustaining ourselves in the future?How does the "new normal" affect our embodied cognition processes?What new social scenarios await us? How do new artistic communities correspond to them?What is "home", a potentially liminal place of waiting/re-waiting?What is the place of ritual and the Sacred now and in the times to come? How do we engage with these practices authentically and ethically?
WITH Aldo Aliprandi (IT), Marianna Andrigo (IT), Irina Baldini (IT/NL), Selina Bonelli (UK), Daz Disley (UK), Marisa Gareffa (AU/IT), Nicola Fornoni (IT), Fenia Kotsopoulou (GR/UK), Ash McNaughton (UK), Joseph Morgan Schofield (UK), Sara Simeoni (IT/DE), Marcel Sparmann (DE), VestAndPage (Verena Stenke & Andrea Pagnes), Emily Welther (US/DE).
PHOTOGRAPHS Lorenza Cini, Fenia Kotsopoulou, Marcel Sparmann
