The pathway will take its cue from the figure of the oracle as a sapiential, evocative and mysterious dimension capable of opening up to art as the door providing access to Elsewhere and to the future – art as the oracle itself. Through an analysis of visual, performance, theatrical and poetic works of art, participants will be invited, using the language most congenial to them, to experiment with this practice of soliciting creation. Through specific exercises linked both to performance art and to creative writing, they will be urged to create their own ‘oracular work of art’.
Francesca Grilli is a visual artist who works in Brussels and Bologna. Having a preference for the language of performance art among the visual arts and experimental theatre, she conveys her artistic message in video, performance art and installations, focusing her attention on the complexity of intimate narrative and on the search for a performance action of the utmost intensity, focusing to communicate directly with the personal and collective unconscious.
Her one-woman shows of note include Italian Council 9 - Sparks 2021, Gamec Bergamo (2021), The forgetting of air, MAXXI (2016) , Family al Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (2015-2017), Variazioni per voce at the MACRO in Rome (2012) – the result of a spell in residence at the museum – and The Conversation at the MAMbo in Bologna (2010).
Her work has been presented at various exhibition venues in Italy and abroad such as STUK, House of dance, image and sound, Belgium (2021), Fundação de Serralves in Porto (2017), Palais De Tokyo, Paris (2017), viceversa Padiglione Italia at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), the MADRE in Naples (2012), the Serpentine Gallery in London (2010) and Manifesta7 in Bolzano (2008).
From 2017 to 2019 Grilli was Associate Artist at the Santarcangelo dei Teatri Festival in Rimini.
Azzurra D'Agostino was born and lives in a small village on the Appenines between Tuscany and Emilia. She has published various collections of poems (winning the Premio Carducci, the Premio Ciampi Valigie Rosse and being shortlisted as a finalist in the Premio Viareggio-Repaci), and she writes for the theatre both for adults (Daria Deflorian, Teatro dei Venti, Marco D'Agostino and others) and for children (Teatro dell'Argine and others). She collaborates in visual artist Francesca Grilli’s performance 'Sparks' and has joined with her for the past few years in setting in motion a dialogue-based creative pathway on various projects. She has published albums for children and a novel for teens for DeA Planeta Libri. In addition to writing, she holds poetry workshops for people of all ages and is president of the Associazione SassiScritti in Porretta Terme (BO), with which she was shortlisted as a finalist in the Ubu prize for best organisational project of 2016 and in the Premio Rete Critica in 2018.