Projects

IF A CITY IS SITUATED ON A HEIGHT
Desidumancy workshop

Curated by
Ariell Zéphyr
Greta di Poce
Valerio Pastorelli

“If a city is situated on a height” is a performative work in the form of a workshop.

The project is conceived as a biennial nomadic workshop that ideally takes place during each new moon, the moon that confuses desire, according to the Marseille tarot.
The work is conceived as an act of divination of the participants’ desires, literally a “desidumanzia”: de (lack) sidus (stars) manzia (divination).

Participants develop a speculative praxis by sharing their desires and materializing the costumes of future humans in the present.
The entire creative process is imbued with the concept of “minoritarian concrete utopia.”(MCU)

The workshop is divided into two phases, each lasting 3 days: in the first phase, discussions, games, and activities are organized to stimulate joy, complicity, and intimacy among the participants.

Here, the confrontation in expressing desires is born, where each participant imagines their future self. In the second phase, there is no organization: everything changes based on the participants, expressed individual desires, the city, and the people we work with.
This allows for the spontaneity of a collective “minoritarian becoming.”

Each participant will develop a practice that will be included in the Encyclopedia of the customs and habits of future humans and will be shared.

It’s the beginning of an intimate and collective escape route.

On November 25th, the Mazzacorati Theater in Bologna transformed into a gym, hosting a self-awareness training “in preparation for the manifestation of one’s personal and collective boundaries and ‘noes.’” At the entrance of the villa, the gym’s manager welcomed the audience, inviting them to perform three self-stretching exercises before entering the “No Gym.”

In the first stretching exercise, a trainer introduced herself as a caryatid and encouraged the spectators to adopt plastic poses inspired by a personal myth that influences their identity (identification). In the second exercise, a coach prompted participants to let themselves fall into the arms of others while recounting a moment of powerlessness (relaxation). In the third and final warm-up exercise, participants were asked by the first trainer to write a question directed at their future selves (extension).

Inside the building, the anteroom hosted a practice of shedding clothing and internal toxicity, necessary to enter the theater. The theater itself became the gym, featuring two exercises dedicated to dreams, with brushes to paint images related to them on the body.

In the center of the theater, sitting on a staircase, a trainer wore a mirror on her face and invited those reflecting to narrate about the image, while the first trainer overlaid her voice describing what she felt about herself. On stage, a sewing circle proposed the construction of accessories symbolizing personal fears. In a square drawn on the floor, a couple of people drew their respective boundaries on each other.

The final practice took place on a narrow staircase, where participants whispered their desires to the caryatid trainer; she announced them from the balcony: “Grace desires to live!” “Sara desires the same love for the same love!” “Teo desires to live in a world of cubes like Minecraft!”

“We are merchants of desires, shop assistants in a future shopping centre, where the hidden strategies of the soul are visited.

The currency of exchange is desire: desire for desire.

“OhAhSì welcoming AHAHAH” is a participatory performance developed in collaboration with the workshop participants “If a city is situated on a Height” held at Opificio Puca in Sant’Arpino.

Together, we transformed the space, a former textile factory, into a shopping centre of the future by dividing it into four departments.

In the first department, passing through the practices of the present (the point of light), past (the fall) and future (the time capsule), and then welcoming the spectators to the carpet room, the Merchants introduced the shopping centre.

The second department started from the desire to reconnect their own body, a practice developed by walking with one’s brother, becoming children again.

The third department opened with the Stripping practice, where the people could let go of their daily life burdens. When finished, the spectator was free to experience the space as they wished, being able to play with props such as hula hoops, rocking horses, etc., or trying out the practices of boundary (discussing and marking boundaries on the other’s body), sky-earth (abandoning the womb and finding one’s own identity), and spiral (forgiving a parent).

In the last section, all reasoning is abandoned, and the “madness” of becoming a child is given free rein. Each spectator reveals their desire by writing with white chalk on the charred walls of the mall. The laughter of the merchants accompanies the actions, and then they transform their voices into screams of longing.

The performance ends when each person declares their desire before leaving the burnt-out room.

“I think I saw us fading (Sense Decay)” is a research project born by the concept of “curse”. 

Curse comes from the Latin maledicere, i.e. to say wrong. It is a phrase that the reflexive consciousness repeats judiciously about actions implemented or to be implemented. these are a visual filter through which our semiotic automation signifies the real, even before it appears, and above its existential matter. Where do these phrases come from? Who taught them to us and imprinted them on our minds? We want to imagine a learning space that is a workshop for the dissolution of curses. 

Starting from a deconstructing meaning process and radicalising the semiotic and physical possibilities that unfold from it, the project stems from the speculative hypothesis that we can reconstruct new semiotics of everyday space, face, voice and body. The elements will be analysed separately during different workshops, with a view to choral performative restitution.

The keys to investigation are three:

1    I exchange the pleasure or displeasure that things give me through a name I give them. And I curse or bless them. But this judgment is not about the in-self existence of the thing, but only about the relation of my body to the thing. The thing is beyond judgment, it is beyond good(say) and evil(say).

2    Desire is a directed pleasure or displeasure. It is an existential investment mediated by knowledge of the relation with a thing. 

3    Space is a value machine. The place is a strategic space. What distinguishes a place is its physical availability; for a space is the symbol of the place usage derived from their expectations.

Part of the iconography of the project is inspired by the “Mocking of Christ” iconography.

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