threetigersversusthreetigers
What does it mean for you to inhabit a space during a residency period?
It's a truly fantastic way of living – everyone, not just artists, should have a right to be able to live the way people live in a residency experience. You're outside your domestic environment so you get a chance to de-domesticate, to get back to the wild in some ways, to disable your habits. It's temporary and if there's a guesthouse then it's a transitory home. There should be masses, truly masses of shared houses, forests to dwell in, to think and to create in. Outside your own home. It's a place for losing your sense of time. For wasting it, as you should. It's also a space for mixing – because space is never general, it's always one space in particular. It lies at the crossroads of two roads, of those two roads, it occupies a volume, it has its own specific textural consistency. In other words creation never takes place in the outer universe, it's always geographically, emotionally situated. Where something happens, where we've sought a remedy for some malfunction, where we've asked ourselves a question, where an idea has come to maturity. Besides, every residency space has its referent bar. The Mattatoio space is the Bar della Signora where the coffee's really bitter. In other words we're influenced by everything, everything around us changes us, it penetrates our work especially while it's still in the making. Artistic residencies are the only serious alternative to tourism.
How would you define the space of your work and research? What will you investigate on this occasion?
This is what we wrote in answer to the question .
i saw a documentary on an octopus. short. made in the '60s. the voice spoke french, didn't understand much, in fact virtually nothing. but the pace was horrific, like a horror movie. i jumped at the start of every sentence. the octopus had the metallic graininess of a technicolor film. on account of the narrator's voice, and of the sound, it felt like a murderer, it moved about threateningly on the sea bottom, tentacular and viscous. but then it was an octopus, it was only doing its job. who knows whether it was always the same octopus. i often wonder, when i watch documentaries, whether the octopus whose story we're following, the crouching lion, the doodlebug are always the same octopus the same lion the same doodlebug. or whether they're different individuals, filmed at different times and possibly even in different places. would i be able to tell one from the other? and what are we capable of distinguishing with any certainty anyway?
Some of things we're interested in. Memory disorders. Precisely interferences, holes. Solitude, or possibly in the plural: solitudes. A series of solitudes. A lot of empty space around a body. Places for cruising. A utopia of bodies of which we have no experience.
We might seek a common area, an area of indiscernibility, and start to live in it. Or possibly what separates and distinguishes a disorder from a condition, from a fuck. W. in one of her works sews together two pieces of stale bread with a red thread. To re-make the whole loaf, which is impossible to put back together. To stop life, to put off death. It's a gesture of despair, yet full of future. A future that's patched up, that's been tampered with.
Or we might just toss everything into the nettles. The nettles are lucky, They have all those rejected ideas to feed on.
Define “care” in three words
repair / re-create / touch
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. Awarded the Premio Ubu for best actress under 30 in 2009, she played Kaspar in La leggenda di Kaspar Hauser, a cult film directed by Davide Manuli in 2012.
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. 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. To be honest, in addition to their artistic projects, they share pretty much everything else as well.