Italiano
My performance practice develops from the urgency to inquire and display the complexity of (my/your/their) different bodies and identities. I see myself in the interstices of gender definitions, in the liminal space left behind by any categorization. I am particularly interested in the permanent status of (gender) transition, endless research of becoming. With humbleness I act and call for non-binary possibilities, working between activism and performance.
Tecnicha: performance
TITTA COSETTA RACCAGNI
Pornopoetica
Pornopoetica is an art project that explores the border between sexual desire and pornography. Its aim is to either create or open up new visions and possibilities. Pornography usually uses stereotypes. On the opposite Pornopoetica introduces the ideas of unknown and unfamiliar as aesthetical principles and ways to de-construct bodies.
The project questions both the body representation and its performativity. It stages body and the obscene in order to trigger a short-circuit in the approach to pornogrphy.
EVA MAYA
Eva Maya research practice is based on the encounter with the Other. She adopts the anthropological technique of Participatory Observation in order to gain deep experience of different human categories. This allows her to investigate archetypal human identities such as Femininity, Masculinity, Erotical Desire or Power. Identity thus become a wide and varied set of meanings: “I would suggest the possibility to be more”
RICCARDO MATAKLAS
My work arises explores the realm of human consciousness and the discovering of its unfolding quality. I have a sculpture background but I mainly work with performance and painting and with both, I explore the true potential of human being and reveal the hidden yet undiscovered sides of our potential.
My work witnesses a phenomenological approach, therefore, it often appears after long research and deep inquiries, in fact, I often associate my work to a geopolitical context. Concerns in my work include spiritual growth and how human being can develop further as a species living on earth, including the cycle of birth and death, I show the positive side of being, collectively and alongside tuned to the individual understanding of the world.
My performance and painting are responsive about the human condition in different cultural e geographical contexts. My work attempts to find answers and solutions to our way of behaving in the world as responsible creatures.
Ella Bottom Rouge/ Anti Diva
Super femmina, scopro il burlesque dopo anni di teatro fisico. Il mio è un passaggio, un
anti-canone, una liberazione dagli stereotipi. Dentro e fuori il mondo patinato e super
femminile del burlesque c’è anche un altro ambito. Femminile si, glamour, si, ma anche
tanto, terribilmente queer. ……………………………………………
Super femme, I discovered burlesque after years working in theatrical productions.
My character is an anti-canon transition, it’s breaking free the strereotypes.
Inside and outside the glossy and hyper feminine burlesque world there’s another side.
Which is femme, glam and queer as hell.
I Figli di Marla
I FIGLI DI MARLA is an art performative community, is a philosophy, is a production.
Senith
Senith is a queer drag performer, curator of workshops and events, and queer activist. Co-founder of Eyes Wild Drag, Senith works with the experimentation with roles, genders and the erotic imaginary, and has contributed to the first performative and critical construction of the Faux Queen in Italy, redrawing the queer imaginary around the feminine/femminile. Senith has often captured the attention of national and international media. In 2012, she was involved in a international tour that took her in numerous European cities, as well as in the US. She is the artistic director of the festival GendErotica. In 2013, in the occasion of the festival, she organized the first Italian (and European) Fem Conference, which gathered together numerous artists, activists, and academics from various parts of the world. In the same year, the festival was hosted by Arte Fiera in the city of Verona, in the space curated by the organization CUNTemporary. In 2015, the “Erotic Lunch” was then born: a lunch-show dedicated to erotism, of which Senith is performer and art director. In 2016, Senith creates her first solo show, BAD ASSolo. In the same year, she plays a role as co-protagonist in the documentary Al di là dello specchio (Beyond the mirror), by Cecilia Grasso, which features in several festivals both in Italy and abroad. The film won the best direction award at the Newark International Film Festival (USA). Morover, Senith participates to the realization of the work La Luna in Folle by the Italo-Libanese artist Adelita Hosni-Bey (which was selected for the Maxxi Award 2016) by performing at the Museo Nazionale per le Arti del XXI Secolo on the 29th of Sept.
La Musa e gli Artisti
In the work “The Muse and the artists”, two well-established contemporary painters create various works, all connected by the hints and suggestions provided by a young and politically incorrect muse. The muse always has the last word on the destiny of the completed works, which is to say that the works will become of public domain only if what the artists have realized satisfy the muse. Otherwise, the artists will have to destroy the works in front of her eyes, and no memory will remain about them. Hence why, of 10 works realized by the group in the last nine years, 9 have been completely lost. The identity of the three protagonists will be revealed only when the project will end because, appropriating the quote by Oscar Wilde, “The Muse and the artists” believe that “to reveal art and hide the artists is the ultimate end in art”.
Slavina
Slavina is a multimedia artist: she defines her research and creative field as porn activism. She became a video maker at the DIY school of media activism with Candida TV; in the late ‘90s she was involved as photographer and performer in PhagOff, the first queer party in Rome. In 2005 she moved in Spain where she discovered the post-pornography scenery. Since then, her production has grown focusing on body politics and the representation of sexuality. Chasing an impossible balance between art and activism, in her projects (video, theatre, cabaret and workshops) she wants to enhance the political transformation potential of intimacy sharing. Thanks to her effort in networking and translations, she eased the diffusion in Italy of the most interesting works and artists of the Spanish contemporary feminism. She belongs to the collective of directors “Le ragazze del porno” and to the academic research and performative transnational project of Zarra Bonheur.
Lilly Lablonde
I am a perfomer, writer and director for theatre and cinema. My artistic interest focuses on the desire to represent stories that hardly find their own space in the art world. I have always been very passionate about the topic of gender identity and sexuality.
In my performative works I experiment with different languages of art communication (video, literature, sound and poetry). In the last two years I have been mainly focused in the realization of short films: Immaginare T (2014) and The Second Closet (2015).
Under the artistic name Lilly Lablonde I created the international art project Bibliothèque Érotique that has the goal to work on the topic of erotism and sexuality through literature and the live performance.
Silvia Giambrone
Mainly I use conceptual art to illustrate my own social commentary with a focus on the relation between subject and power. Through several media including performance, installation, sculpture and sound, I explore body practices and contemporary gender politics making viewers aware of the silent and hidden ways power enters everyday life and affects relationships. I am interested in material culture and image culture and I dig into everyday life and practices to reveal, as it was almost an archaeological operation, the signs of both the physical and invisible evidences of the ‘subjectification’ process.
Marsala
MARSALA is an artistic collective born in 2013 from the meeting between Maralla Rita and Teresa Sala. We develop multimedia projects of research about the relationship between body, gender, identity and space. In addition to produce audiovisual materials, “Marsala” promote a visual anthropology workshop aimed to explore the relationship between city and identities in the contemporary society. Rita is a visual anthropologist specialized in different forms of expression: video, collage, installation, photography and writing. Teresa works as a filmmaker and director, alternating commercial work in independent projects. Always interested in the performing arts, in 2015 she writes and directed her first play, “Sanificata”: a monologue about the obsession for cleaning body and spaces.
Stella Stefania Gagliano
Stella Stefania Gagliano studied Visual Arts at IUAV, in Venice, and graduated in Bologna at the Fine Arts School. At the same time she practiced theatre, dance and contemporary dance.
She paints on blank canvases nailed to the wall using clay and black charcoal, working on the individual, the human being, evil and madness as well as each peculiarity that makes us different from the rest.
Goghi&Goghi
Goghi&Goghi is an artistic collective project born by the ideas of Mara Pieri, actress and performer, and Elia Covolan, director and illustrator. Goghi&Goghi work on several artistic projects aiming at fusing different artistic languages, based on an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach, from theater to performance, from video to illustration and installation.
Their production is especially focused on gender issues, transexuality, migration, identity and sexuality. They have worked in Italy, Argentina, Chile, Norway and Spain, with the aim of creating a continous, reciprocous dialogue between approaches and skills.
Riccardo Buscarini
Award-winning choreographer Riccardo Buscarini trained at Accademia Domenichino in Piacenza, Italy, and London Contemporary Dance School graduating in 2009. Since then he has been presenting – and often performing in – his own work in the UK and internationally. Riccardo has also taught choreography and performance at Birkbeck University and lead improvisation and composition workshops internationally.
A curious person of eclectic inspirations, Riccardo is an artist focussed on constantly changing his creative approach to choreography driven by a strong desire for the new. His works to date are all quite different. Although his works have taken different shapes and have been presented in very diverse contexts – theatres, galleries and urban spaces – Riccardo is often inspired by autobiographical events translated in viscerally symbolic expressions.
Margherita Elliot
Margherita Elliot is a performer and movement maker originally from Ferrara (IT) and currently based in London. Her artistic practice started mainly with the division of movement-based solo live performance events (artistic label: M.E. Lonely Artist).
In early January 2014 she formed Live Studio Casserole in order to upgrade her practice to a more collaborative and interdisciplinary one; her projects involve movement as well as cinematic imagery, collaborations with visual artists, sound, and creative writing.
Shakinart Community
“ShakinArt” is an artistic Italian duo, active in the field of visual arts and more particularly in Performing Art. Founded by Marco Zocca JeanPierre (musician, writer and visual artist) and Jonathan De Checchi (visual artist and theater actor), the artistic duo is supported by an ever-changing pool of young artists, such as: painters, musicians, actors, writers;
The aim is to go beyond the boundaries of the personal artistic features, channeling them in the implementation of an shocking art experience, designed to interact and communicate with the public in a profound way.
ideadestroyingmuros
ideadestroyingmuros es un colectivo nacido en venecia en 2005. consideramos imprescindible posicionarnos políticamente en la creación artística. esta práctica ha hecho posible la elaboración de procesos geopolíticos y sociales que nos han atravesado, por medio de la interpretación y la traducción de nuestras experiencias singulares y colectivas.
la perspectiva que hemos compartido se basa en diferentes posiciones fronterizas en relación con los conceptos de nación, género, sexo, lengua y creación, con los cuales buscamos juntas nuevos modos de entender y de practicar resistencia, de realizar procesos creativos, recorridos auto-antropológicos y de autogestión. el auto-empoderamiento y la desgarradura de las relaciónes de poder que tejen lo cotidiano “ideal” nos ayudan a entender los mecanismos de mercado y refuerzan nuestra capacidad de negociación. gracias a esto, reencontramos una conciencia de nuestro valor, que no radica en la explotación y en la medida única del neoliberalismo, sino en la creación de nuevas formas.
Eyes Wild Drag
Eyes Wild Drag is a queer-gender-drag group based in Rome that has worked for several years experimenting with genders, roles and erotic imaginary which represent the main forms of expression employed by women in Italy.
Attivist* queer, they curate workshops and drag events (standing on the thin line between harrowing absurdity and magic poetry), they rediscover and redraw the imaginary feminine queer and they organise Genderotica, an international festival of queer art. In 2012 they travelled around the world for exhibiting their work in different European cities and US states.
In 2013 they were guests of Arte Fiera di Verona, the biggest art fair of Verona, in the space curated by association Cuntemporary. In 2013, they organised the most activist and international edition of GendErotica, bringing for the first time within the Italian queer community the concept of Fem. In the same occasion, they established the first Italian (and European) Fem Conference with the help and contribution of many activists and teachers coming from around the world. They’ve currently been working on the new GendErotica.
Anna Ramasco
Anna Ramasco inscena performances collettive volte a superare la diffidenza verso i “diversi” grazie a turbini leggeri, ironici e positivi che li vedono protagonisti. Ha particolare attenzione alle disabilità, soprattutto alla sordità. La performance “50 segnanti” si è svolta a Palazzo Grassi nel Maggio 2014 all’interno dell’atmosfera straniante di un’opera di Doug Wheeler.
Nella performance individuale “La fioraia” ArtVerona 2013 una sessualità a tratti drammatica, morbida o kitch viene festeggiata in una danza in cui falli fatti a mano o acquistati vengono inseriti in vasi di piante fiorite.
Gennaro Maione
Gennaro Maione got trained as a ballet and contemporary dancer at “Ballet Teatro Scuola Rossella Rossi” in Naples and in order to refine his skills attends seminars, lectures and workshops in Berlin at the contemporary dance schools Tanzfabrik and Dock 11 and in Brussels at DCJ contemporary dance school and Thor company.
His project Piel il.el takes its cue from the French novel by T. Jonquet “Tarantula”, then played in the movie by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar “The Skin I Live In.”
It is a performance on the theme of identity. What’s identity? Who can really know? Why is there still a need to confuse “gender identity” with “gender role”?
[…] Gender and sex are two separate things, even though the two words are often used interchangeably. Sex is a physical element whereas “Gender” is a component of identity which is placed in the brain.
Andrea Abbatangelo
Andrea Abbatangelo (°1981, Terni, Italy) makes sculptures and films. By applying a wide variety of contemporary strategies, Abbatangelo plays with the idea of the mortality of an artwork confronted with the power of a transitory appearance, which is, by being restricted in time, much more intense.
His sculptures are an investigation of concepts such as authenticity and objectivity by using an encyclopaedic approach and quasi-scientific precision and by referencing documentaries, ‘fact-fiction’ and popular scientific equivalents. By using an ever-growing archive of found documents to create autonomous artworks, he tries to increase the dynamic between audience and author by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations.
Ruben Montini
Born in Oristano in 1986, Ruben Montini currently lives and works in Berlin. His artistic research, mainly focused on themes of gender, studies the implications of the radical and often violent language which has characterised feminist performances since the beginning of the 60s to queer themes.
Amongst his most recent appearances are the performance Cosa resta di noi – Requiem all’Oratoire du Louvre (Paris, 2015) and the collective Fuck Taboo, curated by Carlo Medesani (2013, Galleria Camera16, Milan).
Giovanna Lacedra
The body is our own tangible reality. It’s a tool of free expression and/or narration of what we’ve been, of what we are, of what we endure, of what we suppress, of what we could potentially give or negate. The body tells. Starting from this, Giovanna Lacedra’s research is centred around themes mainly related to the feminine universe and its tangles, traumas and disadvantages often caught in-between shame and silence. Themes that have been tackled on her project as of now
Starting from this, Giovanna Lacedra’s research is centred around themes mainly related to the feminine universe and its tangles, traumas and disadvantages often caught in-between shame and silence.
Themes that have been tackled on her project as of now are anorexia and bulimia, gender abuse and violence, depression, suicide, infantile abuse.
Mona Lisa Tina
Mona Lisa Tina is an artist, performer and art therapist based in Bologna. Born in Francavilla Fontana (BR) in 1997, she graduated in 2005 in Painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti Bologna [Academy of Fine Art of Bologna] and she mastered in Art Therapy in 2012. Since 2014 she’s activated a formative project on identity at the GAM of Turin in collaboration with the psychoanalyst Giovanni Castaldi. The artist’s work centres on reflections on the body as the site of constant processes of psychic and physical transformation. Her actions are rituals in which the artist’s body is coherently proposed as asexual, always changing and contaminated and where the place of action is often modified in its spatial coordinates. Her performances promote moments of ancestral auto-conscience and of real identity reappropriation so as to introduce an alternative physicality that frees itself from beauty standards.
Kyrahm e Julius Kaiser
Kyrahm is one of the most recognised figures of live art in Italy. She’s a conceptual artist, a video artist, body artist and international performer. She elaborates emotionally-charged performances in which everything that happens is real. She creates innovative concepts and moves between contemporary art and communication. Julius Kaiser is a videomaker, drag king and performance artist. Her own artistic research originates from experimenting and investigating social gender roles as to propose a more fluid vision which respects philosophical Queer theories. Meeting with Kyrahm gave Kaiser’s philosophical contents artistic expression through experimental performances which gained attention all over the world. Kaiser works also as a videomaker and workshops organiser. Kyrahm and Kaiser both operate in the underground scene and the contemporary art world in galleries, museums and international festivals. Together, they organise seminars and events and gave birth to the Italian artistic movement Human Installations.
Stefano Scheda
I have always tried to catch the ‘short circuits’ of reality without altering their objective appearance. I try instead to let one feel at a second glance their waste, their boss-eye, their elsewhere. Since my first artistic research based on the relationship between body and architecture I have gradually moved to investigating social problematics such as: immigration, racism (Di-visione 2007/2010), fear and threat (Meteo 2004), national identity and the feminine condition (Le sfoglie di Garibaldi 2001) and lately, the problematic gender (Roll n’Roll 2009); installations or performances that often become photographic sequences and videos. The Fuoridentro series, through the recurrent motif of the mirror, involves its audience as being guilty of charge in its provocatory and irritating game. The game’s production is an interrogation on the threshold as changeable aperture-closure of the contemporary gaze. All my work is however created through dynamic ductility and leads to speculating on reality’s own perception and its possible translations; possibly a way of giving the spectator the difficult task of distinguishing illusion from reality. This spatial opposition is not just a physical condition, it is also a spiritual and cognitive one. The performative-relational aspect I have been experimenting in T(r)ATTO is the ideal following to the performance Looking for the body of the Artist, staged by me at the Galleria Martina Detterer of Frankfurt: the naked artist in a dark room as something invisible but tangible by the visitor/explorer.
Sergio Racanati
The center of my work is given by an interest in the social history of man in relation to its urban environment, political and architectural. I analyze the lateral elements forgotten by history; reflecting the relationship between the urban landscape and civil development of man; I question the story of architecture and political community’s behavior studying the relationship between individual memory and collective memory.
A body’s work, but not intimate diary, which eschews any narrative intent to favor an analytical perspective, which aims to build a repository of cultural memory, where to draw references and exemplary to critically review the present time. A research tends towards a critical reading of power systems and the complex reality of the globalized economy. An artistic vision and life that moves within “subcultures of resistance” that intends to resist the massification of urban life, the destruction of the environment and landscape. It’s also act politically through the language of art , when politically assumes the meaning of organization, employment and management of the common, social and collective space.
The contexts that are most involved in my artistic research are “residual”, contexts placed at the edge of the great knowledge production and industrial use as result of ‘”illegal power” and the struggles of speculation about life itself.
The political significance responds to the demands of the “multitude of people” who request the policy of reviewing the dichotomy between public / private, individual vision / collective vision, the same subjects that inspire the contemporary art debate called “public”.
AMAE
As a collaborative singularity, AMAE focuses on the tensions generated in marginalised bodies by heteronormative society. Amae’s research contaminates traditional languages of art communication (poetry, video, sound, photography, installation, performance) with mass media via photographic works and performances, which are often broadcast live on the web. Working on international platforms across the EU, AMAE focuses on intersubjectivity and transfer in performance art; inheritance and mimicry of behaviour; mimicry against emulation; identification and conflict; primary society and contemporary society; time and space of assimilation of empathetic behaviours; behaviours towards otherness; transient bodies; augmented reality.