What is the time of research and experimentation for you?
In what ways is your practice influenced by the space of an artistic residency?
How do care and artistic research interact?
We are answering these questions while on a train from Ghent to Hamburg, transitioning between two residencies. The German countryside is running past our window with its woods, its clusters of houses, its industrial areas, with the sun’s rays stretching out into the northern sky. A hole in time, a transition. We are neither here nor there, and in the meantime the materials that we have crossed through in recent days are being reshuffled in our heads, in the humours of our guts. And that is how it is going to be for G. back in Rome, for O. who has extended the trip to Berlin, for G. dashing back into his ceasless moving house, for F. close to the waters, for T. who is waiting and is about to arrive for the first time. In the meantime we are crossing a piece of Europe – Liège, Cologne, Duisburg, Essen –, and to think that Europe in these days wants to think of the word “war”. We left with a crisis under way and over the past few days war has broken out. In the morning while we were getting ready before going into the room we were listening to the news on the radio. Thursday 24 (February) we got up and war had broken out at dawn.
The frequent the stage you need a closed space that become dark, sufficiently empty to be able to fill it with many imaginations. But at the same time we also need for this space to be as permeable as possible, as porous as possible, as sweating as possible. Let war poison us, and bad news, because research is not a separate moment. It does not want purified or neutralised spaces. Destraction is an activity of the mind, possibly the most creative of all. Those who engage in art should allow themselves to be distracted at every moment, in order not to risk becoming obtuse.
It might also be necessary to make the time of research less intensive, broader. I would like a time of research full of holes, of tears, of voids.
But then curating a space is the way to make it exist, it is a non-proprietorial way, and loosening the proprietory knot also requires a lot of exercise, because we are trained for that. Curating is not a synonym of directing, although it is always an act of positioning: so might we say that it is leaving things to breathe and to take shape? Might we say that it also entails leave a bit of room for chaos, for confusion, for the unplanned? It may be here, in this deepest point, that it comunicates with artistic research. In un-programming oneself.
Silvia Calderoni is an actress and performer who began her artistic training at a very young age with choreographer Monica Francia and the Teatro della Valdoca company, for whom she played in several productions including Paesaggio con fratello rotto. Since 2006 she has been an active member of the Motus company and an actress in Rumore Rosa, A place, ICS - racconti crudeli della giovinezza, Crac, Let the sunshine in, Too-late, Iovadovia, Tre atti pubblici, Alexis. Una tragedia greca, nella tempesta, Caliban Cannibal, King Arthur, hosted by numerous national and international festivals. She plays a leading role in The Plot is the Revolution alongside legendary Living Theatre founder Judith Malina. She has been touring the main theatres and international festivals since 2015 with her solo performance MDLSX, for which she also wrote the script in conjunction with Daniela Nicolò. In 2022 she was on stage once again with Valdoca with Enigma. Requiem per Pinocchio. Ubu Prizewinner for 2009 as best actress under 30, at the cinema she was Kaspar in La leggenda di Kaspar Hauser, a cult film directed by Davide Manuli (2012), and she featured in Last Words (2020) by Jonathan Nossiter with Nick Nolte, Kalipha Touray, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgard and Alba Rohrwacher, in the Sky TV series Romolus directed by Matteo Rovere and in Non mi uccidere (2021) by Andrea De Sica. She is an associate artist with the Queering Platform in Hong Kong’s Kowloon Cultural District.
Ilenia Caleo is a performer, activist and independent researcher. Since 2000 she has been working as an actress, performer and scriptwriter for the contemporary stage, working with a variety of different companies and directors. Training as a philosopher, she obtained a PhD in research into the body and performance between performance studies and political philosophy at Rome's La Sapienza University. She concerns herself with corporeality, feminist epistemiologies, experimentation in the performing arts, new institutions and forms of cultural work. She is a research fellow with the IUAV in Venice and the coordinator of the Arts Module in the Master's Degree in Gender Studies and Policies at Roma Tre University and she collaborates with the research group from the five-year project entitled “INCOMMON. In praise of community. Shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959-1979)”, ERC Starting Grant. She has published a book entitled Performance, materia, affetti. Una cartografia femminista, Bulzoni 2021 and co-curated In fiamme. La performance nello spazio delle lotte 1967/1979, b-r-u-n-o 2021. An activist with the Teatro Valle Occupato and in the commons and queer-feminist movements, she grew up both politically and artistically in the underground and social centre counterculture scene.
Calderoni-Caleo met in Motus's Animale politico project at the Teatro Valle Occupato in 2012. They took part together in Motus's show entitled nella tempesta, and for some years now they have been pursuing a shared project that unfolds amid workshop phases and artistic residencies, an open and orbiting research workshop. Starting with a workshop at the Biennale College Teatro in 2018, they have developed KISS, a performance project with 23 performers produced by the Santarcangelo Festival, CSS Udine and Motus. Since 2018 they have been lecturers in the Visual Arts Workshop at the IUAV in Venice. For the Queering Platform in Hong Kong they co-curate a travelling project entitled SO IT IS. In 2021 they were part of Flu水o, a collective and cross-disciplinary project that was the winner of the Italian Council (9th Edition 2020). In actual fact, in addition to artistic projects, they share more or less everything.