ABSTRACTS

Antia Diaz Otero (PHD Candidate, Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Practitioner at the University, Theoretician in the studio?

From the research on the creation processes that I carry out in my phd, I propose a reflection on my position as a researcher. Halfway between artistic practice and scientific research, I am interested in the relationship, exchange, enrichment and also the tension that is created between these two dimensions of knowledge.

Gabriella Riccio (artist-choreographer, activist, researcher)
Performative and prefigurative practices: the intersection of aesthetics, ethics and politics

In the last years my practice as artist-choreographer interweaves with activism and research, a deep interest into the Italian movement of self-governed cultural spaces and the broader mosaic of similar experiences in the world. In this scenario what elements emerge connecting artistic practice and political activism?

Novella Oliana (PHD Candidate, University of Aix en Provence)
Photography as process and event. Cartography of an experience between thinkable and visible.

How can I define the idea of creative process in visual arts and the meaning of the image within this evolving system? Starting from my experience in research, I try to reflect on a particular hybrid space characterized by indecisiveness, where form and content transform and interact generating areas of contact, separation, interrelation and juxtaposition. Post-modernism impose us to become more conscious of the images we create and share: this is a means of emancipation against visual redundancy, hyper-dissemination of contents and depersonalization generated by the web. Through an interdisciplinary approach, focused on a methodology of research and practice, I refer to photography and to its specific characteristic of conveying the complexity of our contemporary changeable world. By freeing the photographic image from a mere aesthetic experience, it then becomes an open, stratified, transforming surface. This is not about separating practice from theory: photography, in this sense, doesn’t support research but constitutes its integral component. Each image is the expression of a complex event: my work therefore proposes different questions and considers photography as an artistic and perceptual experience where research, its methodology and the possibility of its theoretical development are placed. The space of the process becomes a space of relation, creation, perception and acquisition of a vision which involves en embodied experience.

Liuba Scudieri (Anthropologist, Storyteller)
Tales from the Sea. Three women at the sea 2005/2013: Procida, Marsiglia, Orano, Mers el Kebir, Algeri, Taourirt Amokrane, Napoli.

Una panoramica di quello che è stata una ricerca, svariati viaggi ed un’esperienza che ha cambiato la mia vita. Metterò a disposizione alcuni brani di interviste (il materiale di base), un video del mio spettacolo (la materia raffinata) e i passaggi che mi hanno portato dalle une all’altro, cercando di rintracciare e di disegnare i ponti, le scorciatoie e le architetture, nel tentativo di rintracciare i modi in cui è nata una drammaturgia e un’epica personale. Una bellissima opportunità di condividere un processo che si è svelato dopo, a cose fatte. E si è soprattutto rivelato tale soltanto nella pratica e con il pubblico.

Alessia Bernardini and Michela Palermo (Photographers)
Art Zine making. Documentation as creation

The photographic image leaves a trace that become at the same time  artistic gesture, memory and document. Is it possible to consider the production of this trace a performative act? And as a consequence, can we consider the act of looking a choreography? And if so, can we imagine a book, and its the pages,  a place where the different elements (images, graphics, the material itself) are responding to precise functions and acting in a creative process? Through the presentation of the design process and the publication produced during the Zine Making workshop for Marosi 2018, the contribute of Alessia Bernardini and Michela Palermo will focus on the vision of independent publishing as a research field and a creative tool in visual and performative arts. Involving artists from the performative and visual arts, Marosi 2018’s Zine Making atelier has been a place where the performative gesture of visual production was put into action. The result is a collective publication, dedicated to the narration of a place, being truthful or imaginative, immersed in the experience of Marosi 2018.

David-Alexandre Guéniot (Publisher – Ghost edition)
The Performativity of the Book

In this presentation, I will try to develop a reflection based on a double experience: my current practice as a publisher and my past practice as a programmer of performing art events and dramaturgic assistant for dance shows. As a dramaturgic assistant of contemporary dance shows, I had the opportunity to assist and collaborate in creation processes. From this experience, I kept a fascination with the making of a collective object and the complexity of the relationships that the choreographer established with the set designer, the light designer, the sound designer, the costume designer, and, of course, the performers. Fascination that culminated in the attempt to understand in which ways an intention, a word, a movement or an “image” is “choreographed/edited”, so as to pass from the stage to the audience. How does dance design its own object? How does this design shape both a formal and sensitive framework (material, cultural and fictional) between what happens onstage and what happens in the body and mind of the viewer?

As an editor, this questioning found a new field of reflection and experimentation in the object-book format. Like the choreographer, who has at his disposal the historical, spatial and material configuration of the theatre, the editor resorts to a pre-established material form: the book, which occurs in innumerable formats, materials and uses. The editor has at his disposal the material brought by the author (texts, images, intuitions), but also the technical knowledge of the designer and his/her own sensitivity regarding the selection, hierarchy and interpretation of the raw material provided by the author, not to mention his/her own bibliophile culture to insert the book into a “tradition” (or deviate it thereof). These skills are clearly mixed, because the author also has a sensitivity to design, or because the designer has a bibliophile culture that may provide an editorial point of view. Much of the editor’s work is about organizing the reading conditions: about creating a sort of staging of meanings – whether verbal, visual, formal – that is based on the dynamics of information conveyed by the book. The editor works on creating an empathic relationship with the reader.

This intermediate situation between the worlds of spectacle and editing allowed me to perceive the challenges they pose to one another in terms of translation, or rather, transposition. How to put the performance inside the book? Is the book (always) a performative object? Does a book “perform”? What does that mean? What kind of action can a book generate? Is the “performativity” of the book an intrinsic feature? Or just a potential?

Anna Gesualdi / Loretta Mesiti (Independent Artist and Curator / Writer-Dramaturg)
Behind Altofest

We think Altofest as a dispositif able to ‘move’ not only persons and social structures but also intimate comprehensions and visions. The meaning of concepts like ‘property’ and ‘sharing’, ‘private’ and ‘public’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ shift and each one – citizens space donors, spectators and artists – must reflect anew, what could be directions, necessity and responsibility that inspire their action.

The artistic process breakthroughs the households’ daily life that becomes part of the artworks binding the artists to reconsider and reshape their work. Altofest gives rise to the poetical part of the existence, changing the perspective of daily life. The creative urgency of the artist overlaps with the daily necessities of the host, in a dialogue that redefines the work as well the signs that compose it, while the citizens welcome the possibility that something special it is going to happen. This mutual shock forces us to rethink art’s languages and aesthetics and his role in daily life. Both, the artist and the citizen, going beyond the boundaries of the usual way of conceiving the performing arts and way of living, places and relations.

In this perspective, we gave rise to Altofest in 2011, in Naples, the city where we live. We try to insert a process which traverses all the social elements of the urban fabric and connects them in dialogue. This connection comes from the presence of an external, foreign vision, that expresses itself in the plurality of artistic languages that constitute Altofest’s programme. These semantic interferences give the community the opportunity to speak to each other in a neutral language, to meet in a shared space of risk.