L’ECO DELLE PAROLE: un manifesto poetico sull’adesso

L’ECO DELLE PAROLE: un manifesto poetico sull’adesso

Il manifesto poetico della residenza artistica a scuola con le pratiche estetiche di Comunità dal progetto Eco del Mondo. Scritto con gli studenti della sezione Scenografia e Design del Primo Liceo Artistico Statale Torino nel febbraio 2024, in una dimensione rituale, dove affioravano narrazioni collettive, rapsodie imperfette, memorie e immaginari che osservavano e testimoniavano il presente frantumato: litanie, elenchi, metafore, canti, nuovi sensi… Scarnificando la parola di tutte le sue ‘croste’ storiche e culturali, si tenta di riscrivere e risemantizzare un erratico, frantumato e discontinuo fraseggio poetico.

Che fare davanti allo spettacolo del mondo in frantumi?
Come è potuto succedere? Ricostruire? Cosa può rinascere dalle macerie?

Queste domande sono al centro della creazione dal titolo “Eco del Mondo”, un lavoro sulla frammentazione delle identita’, a cura di Compagnia Tecnologia Filosofica (Fransesca Cinalli, Amalia Franco, Erica Pianalto, Paolo De Santis).

THE TRANSFORMATION OF EMBARRASSMENT INTO CURIOSITY

THE TRANSFORMATION OF EMBARRASSMENT INTO CURIOSITY

In the ambient of the On Mobilisation International Symposium, the School of Wish students Beatrice Sunny Brero, Tommaso Giachino, Elisabetta Lava, Alice Mariotti, Gabriele Totaro and Alessandra Vaccina celebrated the end of the Forever Young project. On this path, they were guided by the artists Francesca Cinalli, Paolo De Santis, Fabio Castello and Valentina Roselli to build an imaginary school based on their likes and desires. During the festivity, the teenagers took the adults back to school where they proposed an alternative lesson plan: a class that immersed the public in play and imagination by tasking them to build ephemeral and soft landscapes, while another one opened them to an experience of tremble and vulnerability when dividing the audience into pairs to exercise losing themselves in each other’s eyes.

The poetic diagram above centers on materials from the second class. It has assembled the expectations and outcomes that were written by the audience before and after steeping in profound eye contact with their partners. With the expectations and outcomes facing each other on the paper as the adults faced each other during the exercise, the focus of the diagram intensifies on what unfolds in the middle, when after a few nervous smiles the partners relaxed into a shared experience, when embarrassment transformed into a sense of calm and discovery. The diagram can be read from left to right, right to left, diagonally, from down to up or the other way around, allowing the gaze to take a walk, similar to how the students made the drawings used here to emphasize the in-between space of two bodies: by practising walking on paper.

How could the transformation of vulnerability into bravery inspire an educational paradigm? 

What do the needs that were made visible by the students’ imaginary lesson plan say about the current, normative school system?

How to cultivate trust instead of self-awareness in a classroom? 

Expectations and outcomes written by the School of Wish audience on the 31st of May, drawings made by the School of Wish students during the workshops, data collected and arranged into a diagram by Kadri Sirel.

DARK MATTERS: nel cuore dell’abisso

DARK MATTERS: nel cuore dell’abisso

Tre frammenti audio-video miscelano la metafora guida del laboratorio, Dando forma all’acqua e i contenuti del talk “Storie senza archivi e memorie post-coloniali”, all’interno del Festival Dark Matters

Distruggere, ripulire,  

spezzare, rigenerare, 

cancellare, vivificare,  

distruggere, far emergere,  

travolgere, restituire,  

risucchiare, mescolare,  

sotterrare, specchiare 

La metafora dell’acqua, con la molteplicità dei suoi volti, fa risuonare l’abisso oscuro della violenza coloniale e al contempo emergere le domande che possono aprirci al futuro.  

Una volta scesi nel cuore dell’abisso, come desideriamo tras-formare ciò che vediamo? 

Chi ha diritto all’archivio? 

Chi decide chi entra e chi non entra nell’archivio? 

Come il rapporto con l’archivio ci tocca? 

Da punto di vista ci sentiamo implicati tra passato, presente, futuro? 

Come mantenere il potere di scandalo di archivi latenti, di tracce, dei materiali, perché aprano altre possibilità? 

Cosa può una istituzione culturale? 

Vulnerabili  

alle domande, 

i corpi in movimento  

radicano il sogno futuro, 

nella mescolanza 

nello sguardo molteplice 

nel coraggio di tenere tra le mani 

 le proprie e altrui rovine. 

Cosa raccontano? 

I pezzi sparsi 

i frammenti occultati, 

i silenzi, 

in un nuovo assemblaggio 

possono creare una nuova narrazione? 

Eugenia Coscarella

NOTE: 

Questi video e la restituzione sono stati ispirati dal mio rituale mensile di preparazione e tintura con henné, dove le polveri tintorie si trasformano grazie alla mescolanza con l’acqua. 

Il processo di preparazione, lavaggio e risciacquo sono stati il set di ripresa dei primi due video. 

La documentazione di questi eventi del Festival d’inverno, arrivano ora, a lento rilascio, così come richiede il processo descritto. 

OUT-OF-THE-SHADOW LIBRARY

OUT-OF-THE-SHADOW LIBRARY

When playing with the term shadow library, a concept often used to describe guerilla databases of contents that are otherwise not readily accessible, the out-of-the-shadow library claims the prominence of knowledge that is often obscured, stigmatised and pushed into the margins of cultural consciousness. Following Lavanderia a Vapore’s dramaturgical line from the Dark Matters Winter Festival, through the Spring Rolls Spring Festival and towards the On Mobilisation Symposium, the books and references proposed here, take the reader on a path in and out of the shadows: to dig in and immerse in the darkness and resurface seeing the present and the future through other lenses. Specially designed chapters guide the reader through an open-ended pathway, through themes of blackness, darkness, archives, temporalities, the body, desiring and mobilising in collective action. The library, co-curated by Nora Book&Coffee, calls to join in protest: in reading, pleasure and rest to discover the collective dimension of dreaming and to craft alternative visions for the present world.

The library is not finished. If you have books, articles and other references to recommend, send an email with your suggestions to documentazione@lavanderiaavapore.eu
Thank you!!

METABOLO: CYANOTYPE SCANS OF THE UNDERWATER

METABOLO: CYANOTYPE SCANS OF THE UNDERWATER

Press play,


absorb live feed from the marine ecosystem located below the Frying Pan Tower, 34 miles off Cape Fear, North Carolina,


allow the underwater sounds to accompany your reading.

Unlike most other underwater webcams, this one does not show the animals in captivity but in their natural habitat. It connects us to the marine ecosystem that the artist Valerie Tameu interacted with in her work Metabolo (2023), where the unique textures and movements of the ocean world were translated through machine learning into data that modified the soundtrack on which the artist created the performance, in Europe, in real-time. In her work, the human-machine interaction evoked a more spiritual layer, represented by the myth of Mami Wata, an aquatic divinity worshipped in West, Central and Southern Africa and in the Afro-American diaspora, halfway between a human and a fish, a hybrid and alien being:

The cyanotype prints and drawings are edited into videos and accompanied by text from Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals* by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. A mutant documentation creating fictional underwater scans and seabeds, calling to imagine those adapted to living deep in the ocean as well as the lives lost there: evolving throughout centuries into hybrid creatures to re-surface with knowledge about breathing in unbreathable circumstances.

The above proposes a multi-media ritual of it’s own that, through the movement of colors and symbols, seeks to give body to the imagination of Mami Wata, the half-fish half-woman aquatic goddess, kindred with sea mammals and amazing at not drowning.

As one of the winners of the Residenze Digitali 2024, Tameu will continue her cyber-magical ritual of animating the legend of Mami Wata.
While remembering her residency in September 2023, the traces collected here are an archaeology of the future – a constellation of imaginations, technologies and memories that will possibly be re-awakened, studied and modified in November 2024, during Digital Residencies Week.

Kadri Sirel

*words from the preface: a guide to undrowning

PUBLISHED PAPER

PUBLISHED PAPER

Kadri Sirel

*from the yerbamala collective: BURNITALLDOWN: AN ANTIFASCIST SPELLBOOK