“IL CIELO IN UNA STANZA -A Room with a View” is an immersive performance that explores the energetic power of personal objects and their ability to evoke memories, emotions, and deep connections. The performance is divided into several phases, inviting both the performer and the audience to reflect on the relationship between objects, space, and identity.
The performer and the objects:
The performer inhabits an intimate space surrounded by objects, some personal, others donated by the audience. These objects become the protagonists of a silent choreography, a language through which the performer explores the connections between the objects themselves, their symbolic meaning, and their emotional resonance.
The contribution of the audience:
Viewers are invited to actively participate in the performance by bringing a significant personal object. This object becomes an integral part of the scene, intertwining with the stories and emotions of the other objects present. This creates a collective and constantly evolving plot, a landscape of shared memories.
The viewer’s experience:
The viewer witnesses a microcosm that reflects the complexity of the macrocosm. They attend a delicate dance of observation, touch, and movement, perceiving the emergence of deep connections between objects, performer, and the surrounding space. The constantly evolving composition offers a poetic companion for difficult times, inviting reflection and contemplation.
The purification ritual:
The performance culminates in a collective ritual at sunset. The objects, full of energy and meaning, are offered to the flames of a bonfire. This symbolic act of purification and release of persistent energies celebrates change and transformation.
Concept and performance: Francesca Cola
Production: Nòva, Creative Living lab
FERVERE: Practices of Fermentation and Narration for a Community in the Making
We immerse ourselves in a flow of nourishing and convivial body practices, exploring the theme of fermentation as a fundamental practice of intersectional feminism. A collective queer leavening of “devourers” who will in turn be “devoured” in a process of reciprocal exchange is activated. FERVERE is configured as a proliferating practice of the margin, capable of indicating new possible ways and worlds based on complicity, reciprocity and mutualism.
The practice of relationship and care:
FERVERE is a practice of relationship based on care. The preparation of Kombucha tea, a sparkling drink with a rich nutritional profile, is transformed into a ritual act, metaphor and starting point for community sharing. The Kombucha mother, known as SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast), a soft and plump disc, establishes a multi-species relationship with those who manipulate it, punctuated by the times and methods of fermentation.
Vibrational activation and shared narration:
After a shared tasting, the group immerses itself in a body practice oriented towards vibrational activation, feeding the field of reciprocity. Participants are invited to give voice, through a stream of consciousness, to an interwoven narration (twine) around the word “MOTHER”. The simultaneity of the narrations opens the verbalization to a constellation of stories, generating a proliferation of voices and ideas that influence each other. A sound trace of this process is recorded, material that will constitute the performative installation.
Practice, performance and political implications:
The sharing of the Kombucha practice, intertwined with body practice and shared narration in a circle, relates to the context as a nourishing and convivial practice. Through the practice of fermentation and the ritual ceremony of tea and storytelling in a circle, themes with political reflections are explored in depth: care as a fundamental practice of transfeminism and intersectional feminism, anti-speciesism, reciprocal narratives of symbiotic communities and animal resistance on an ethical, health and economic level (AMR – antimicrobial resistance), fermentation as an autonomous, feminist, transcultural and anti-capitalist practice. A practice of the margin that can indicate new possible ways and worlds based on complicity, reciprocity and mutualism.
The performance:
A performative restitution can arise from the practice, involving the participating community or, where this is not possible, the artist in first person. The bodies, veiled by satin cloths, evoke an invisible preciousness enclosed within a soft, mutable and changing envelope/container. This sum of concealed “mother bodies” generates, in assonance with the proliferation of voices in the sound installation, a proliferation of conceivable forms, never fixed, at times “monstrous”, which play with the theme of the Mother, of revelation and of emergence/immersion. If a monster is a frightening body because it is out of control, a disturbing form is a form free from control.
concept: Francesca Cola
in collaboration with Gaia Giovine
with the support of RicercaX – Fabbrica dei gesti
agitated and agitated during Research Camping 2023 at Lavanderia a Vapore in Collegno and Equality Festival 2023 – Lecce
