ENGAGE

Alexis Blake

We Will Not Be Moved, is an ongoing project that focuses on the on the ambivalent relationship between individual and collective and the normation and freedom of the contemporary represented female body. The performance reformulates two archives: the protest postures that women have assumed during the history of dissidence and the New Dance Group (NDG) in New York City in the 1930’s that translated political unrest into movement.
We Will Not Be Moved, which was conceived in Milan during a workshop at Viafarini, was first presented for the event, Stage as a Social Platform for the Milan XXI Triennale during April, 2016. The work was shown on Alberto Burri’s Teatro Continuo, which is a historical artwork/stage that served as a site of political protests in Milan for many years in Parco Sempione. During the workshop in Milan, Blake worked with a group of women - professional dancers and women of migrant backgrounds, who are heads of different agencies that are fighting for women, immigrant and civil rights. During the workshop Blake used a combination of archival images from The New Dance Group to the archive that she facilitated online where anyone can contribute images of women protesting/demonstrating for a cause throughout history and around the globe. She used the online archive to investigate the gestural language of protests, the formations of the crowd and the slogans that are used. She also had each woman bring in their own chant in their own language, which they then abstracted as a group by means of repeating it over and over again until the words became rhythmical sounds; it became a sort of mantra, an incantation, a summoning.

Beatrice Catanzaro

Italian Artist Beatrice Catanzaro together with Dutch Geographer Kolar Aparna realized a research in Bolzano in dialog with representatives from various local aid organizations and civil society members, activists, politicians and scientists, in order to discuss perceptions, ideas and experiences relating to issues of migration at local and international levels. They realized the audio track YOU ARE BUT YOU ARE NOT a trilingual recorded drama, that consists of three chapters and it is conceived as a permanent intervention for the city of Bolzano/Bozen. It starts at the train station and from where it guides the listener along the „borders“ of the city on a given route through the area of the train station to the Rosegger Park in front of the Questura (state police station).

Ilaria Lupo

In 2014, Ilaria Lupo invited sound artist Joe Namy to collaborate on a sound performance for a construction pit in Beirut involving the site’s labourers. Namy created a site-specific soundtrack - composing a collaborative piece with the participants using their tools as instruments to perform live. The final performance was titled Concrete Sampling, arrangement for derbekah and jackhammer.
Now at its second edition, in collaboration with composer and musician Rabih Beaini - the project has a wider perspective on the region and is especially conceived for The Bahrain National Quarry. Nocturne for Pit Orchestra digs into dynamics of music-making in the frame of labor while aiming to explore the intermingled layers connecting the quarry’s identity with the socio-economic shifts in 20th century Bahrain and the Gulf Region.
Beaini engaged with the site laborers after contextual research, in particular on the pearl divers music - Fidjeri. Historically, Bahrain is influenced from the Persian, East African, South Asian and Levantine cultural basins. The Fidjeri is a vocal music of great complexity, embodying a pivotal history of labor in the region. The pearl divers traditionally performed publicly in the Dar music houses. He involved the group in a process where an array of influences were explored and combined. They rehearsed vocal droning, looping, amplifications, polyphonies, solo and choir.
The final performance unfolds as a process navigating between dissonance and harmony. The composition is on and on dismembered and recomposed while the structure contains both conducting and improvisation.
The stone quarry - located in the desert of Hafeera - represents the very heart of sources extraction destined to construction. This landmark site has witnessed the transition between two economic eras and the consequent changes in the system of labor. It came at a time of acceleration, accompanying the radical reconfiguration of the urban landscape and the shoreline. It is a site of Modernity while the project attempts to question this ‘modern’ identity and its ties with the past, still reverberating today. The performance was presented in the quarry itself, opened to the public for the very first time.

Jacopo Miliani

Throwing Balls at Night is inspired by Jeux, a 1913 poème-dansé (‘danced poem’) created in collaboration between Claude Debussy, Sergei Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky, which features a young trio frolicking during an evening game of tennis. Miliani’s performance re-imagines these flirtatious ‘games’ through a mixture of gestures and attitudes created in collaboration with divaD Magnifique, Prince Maya Magnifique, Benjamin Milan and Eve Stainton.

Muna Mussie

What connects Milite Ignoto to Milite Ogbazghi (my grandmother) beyond the name that unites them I do not know. I know it was a surprise to discover that Milite in my mother language, tigrino, means Mary and that Mary is the name of the woman who was assigned the task of choosing, in the first post-war, the coffin containing one of the many fallen anonymous bodies in war that would have represented and honored them in time, or the Unknown Soldier (Milite Ignoto). Coincidences often appear as epiphanies to indicate viable ways or to shed light on already known paths. This is why I have played out a series of studies that investigate further links or discrepancies between different subjects. Unknown Soldier evolves through an interview (possible-impossible) that mimics the nature of coincidence: a phenomenon that tends to undermine the certainties of rational thought based on established truths and to open gaps on more emotional levels, bearers of subjective, arbitrary and therefore short-circuited truths.

Pefura

“A long ribbon spreads out through the city, between Gueule Tapée and Medina. A ribbon which would seem like an Ariadne thread, a link between the various components of the city. The thread served Theseus to escape the cave of the Minotaur. It represented the path to salvation. My Super Kilometer is that ribbon. But here, it’s not about escaping from anything; the reverse is the case. It is an invitation for meeting, exchanging, and discovering. A discovery which is not linked to the great adventure we sometimes hear when addressing that word. Not a big show, nor a dense landscape, nor an unfathomable sea. Simply, human beings, focusing on aesthetics, oblige us to see the essence. My Super Kilometer is an open-air gallery which responds to the rhythm of the city. That city is Dakar and this gallery aims to break its social and aesthetic barriers. The painter appears alongside the fishmonger and the car mechanic. The photographer contends with the tea vendor and the tinker. The artist, whether recognized by academic institutions or not, takes up, on a daily basis, with both the handyman and the Fine Arts school alumnus.
Opposites, or at least what we could have defined as such, get closer and discover each other and contradict themselves, in a wise and civilized atmosphere of the palaver tree. Here is the city. The omnipresence of the city that gives it its vitality. A simple pleasure to be together for a moment that hopefully could last forever, as is the case in any meeting. And here is the collaborative objective of the UY077 collective having joined the Espace Medina collective: to serve as a book written to help us, not to better understand the inhabitants of Dakar, but to better understand ourselves. The art is not exclusive but inclusive. It is not the private property of someone else, self-proclaimed censors or dictator of good taste. It can be considered as a social link, a meta language in which everyone finds his or her own place. And it is absolutely not at random that the project Thread which means “fil” in French is joined in this human adventure, by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.”
Simon Njami

Zoya Sardashti

Waking Up Iranian American is an autoethnographic work and series of performative interventions focused on the ways cultural exchange develops between a performer and a participant. These one-to-one performances create a space where people are invited to participate in discussions about being between cultures, nationalism, and Iranophobia, so that we might move beyond antiquated notions of free and oppressed. In this sense, the dialogical framework of the performances is a form of collaboration and, in its broadest sense, a key to changing power relationships between performers and participants. In Waking Up Iranian American, intimacy is used as a strategy to counteract the positioning cultures of fear intend to create.

Caterina Erica Shanta

“Il cielo stellato” is a documentary film project born in 2015 about the mediatic digitization of the secular rite of Madonna della Bruna in Matera, Basilicata. Matera’s “Sassi” was described by the ancient travellers as a starry sky because it was full of candles during the night.
The rite consists in a long procession with a giant triumphal papier-maché chariot around the city and it is destroyed by all population in the middle of the main square at the end of the day.
The film’s aim is to investigate how an oral culture change itself through a digital dubbing. I observed a proliferation of cameras and smartphones over the people’s head: a second starry sky that records all the destruction phase of the rite.
So I’ve decided to collect all these digital material and upload them into a software to develop a 3D point cloud photogrammetry of the chariot as a third starry sky. Originally, these kind of so wares were developed for digital archeological preservation purposes.