The following is a collection of mutated images taken in the environment of WOW WIDE WEB of Michela Depetris that tell a poetic history of an unknown planet – a surreal and hypnotic installation built in the studio of Lavanderia a Vapore that evokes the materialisation of a sensual web connecting the ever-evolving, changing, transforming bodies that inhabit it.
THE IMAGE
CLOSES IT’S EYES.
THE IMAGE
FINDS ITSELF FULL OF MYSTERIES.
THE IMAGE
DISCOVERS IT’S PART OF A BIGGER PICTURE.
THE IMAGE
ASKS
ANOTHER IMAGE
TO BE THE OCEAN WHERE IT UNRAVELS
Hand-written and -drawn pages from studio visitations to Michela Depetris’ process, layered with digital text, and edited with Giphy and Runway.ml (an AI-powered tool used to animate the images with the sentences written here as choreographic scores; the poetic instructions are inspired by Michela’s process). Kadri Sirel.
ti invito a leggere i frammenti che seguono, come si legge una poesia, prima di andare a dormire.
Cerca una piccola calma. Concediti qualche respiro profondo.
Entra lentamente nelle parole, lasciati accompagnare dal loro suono e dal ritmo dello scorrere.
Se necessario torna indietro.
La qualità del tempo accende significati.
Buon viaggio
Questi frammenti nascono da un’operazione alchemica che fonde parole, sensazioni, riflessioni, memorie, di alcuni dei partecipanti alla Evening School on Care, un viaggio formativo sul tema della cura, attraverso pratiche, posture informali, orizzontali, trasmissione e costruzione di saperi a partire da esperienze e condivisioni collettive.
Cosa rimane di questa immersione sensuale, guidati da un immaginario notturno?
Con forza e semplicità, rimane l’affermazione della cura quale pratica da agire quotidianamente, che richiede sforzo, dolcezza, resistenza, luce, buio.
Ma cosa facciamo quotidianamente, per non cadere nell’incuria?
Come teniamo viva quella attenzione e vibrazione di cui abbiamo tanto bisogno?
Guidata da queste domande, ho pensato di proseguire il viaggio e realizzare 7 amuleti scaccia incuria.
Uno per ogni giorno della settimana.
Saranno 7 amuleti poetici, ognuno realizzato attorno a una parola.
Ne ho già in mente alcune, ma visto che stiamo pensando collettivamente al concetto di cura, ti chiedo, quali sono le tue parole che tengono viva la cura?
The choreographer Salvo Lombardo, in his latest work Sport (2023), studies the physical condition of falling in relation to the Western canon of performance and discipline. In fact, something he said in residency at Lavanderia a Vapore in March 2023 inspired the following – exploring documentation through the lens of falling.
…he said something like „I imagine the Western narrative system that defines these very ideals in a perpetual sunset“ and since that, I have amusingly been thinking about the sun’s gravitational anomaly and about ways in which documentation can act as a thinking companion to try to unlock the sun stuck setting.
With references to competitive sports such as wrestling and gymnastics, the dancers studied the physicality of rising and falling, the motion of recycling energy and motivation. Here, the perpetual sunset becomes a metaphor that refers to Western paradigm of self-performance that keeps its human capital invested in an internalized competition with oneself, circulating between pleasure and dread, infinitely searching for opportunities that would lift the feeling of unaccomplishment. There is an instillment of a terror of falling, of the darkness, of the unknown: what comes after is an unfamiliar and obscure territory.
The documentation performs a disentanglement of the loop by speculating an alternative scenario of the fall. This is not an explicit operation on the anxieties society has infected falling with, but rather a study on the physical possibilities and open-ended continuation of falling by starting from the document as a bodied and fleshy entity that during the following experiment goes through a series of declines: actions that transform it’s chemical consistency to a point of no return. By setting up the conditions of no turning back, the path unearths and examines possible ways forward, rethinking falling not as a motion down but as an opening of other territories.
The de-disciplined potion-making looks at falling as an alchemic strategy, a transformative action which re-imagines falling as a condition without rising, without an end, and not as a motion down but forward.
Where will it take you?
Photo performance by Kadri Sirel, subtitles captured from conversations in the studio between Salvo and the performers.
The following is an assemblage of traces from the social dreaming practice led by Edoardo Mozzanega and Chiara Prodi, artists in residency at Lavanderia a Vapore in September 2023 with the project Dream of a Tiger.
Social dreaming dates back to the 1980s when it was developed as a method of sharing dreams in social environments. Mozzanega and Prodi introduced an expanded version of the practice, inviting the participants to share stories, dreams and rumours in the present tense and first person, and with that, shaping a collective dream matrix of imagining, listening and resting with the theme:
I ONCE KILLED AN ANIMAL
I ONCE FEARED TO BE KILLED BY AN ANIMAL
The following collages are composed of some recurring images from the collective dreaming. They take the contrast between the dreamy and the morbid as a starting point, visualizing a similarity between the tradition of how we culturally tell stories and how we regard animals. The text is underlined fragments from Ursula le Guin’s „My Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction“ that the artists had with them in the studio. It describes the function of an arrowlike narrative… a story arc as linear as the spear that killed the mammoth...
The dark emancipatory motion of the cancan, a dance that originated in Paris in the 1800s, is reimagined without euphoria or climax, but proposed as a deconstructed landscape that loops its pieces into exhausted reiterations without a stop or an exit. Loose memory but automated bodies, internalised voyeurism, pessimistic repetition of leg, arm and ass movements. The dancers are keeping their heads down.
Inspired by Fabritia D’Intino’s residency with CANCAN and the shared training workshop based on the work, these traces collected from the studio build upon the Cancan as an entrapping system that perpetuates sexualizing dancers’ bodies, ending in a pessimistic loop that numbs the discoursive capacity of deconstruction to develop possible alternative scenarios. Fabritia’s process introduced the question, how long does re-organizing the same alphabet satisfy one’s illusion of freedom? How does one exit the Cancan?
Here are some balloons I picked up from the studio that help me wonder just that…
Starting from the action of falling that answers to gravity and weight, the following is a disentanglement of falling from its connotations to a quality of extreme seriousness, such as a rapid decrease of parameters, indicators and values. It proposes falling as a subversion of verticality and the emergence of possible (dis)orientations.
