A research path to oxygenate the collective body
Monday 22 to Friday 26 September and Monday 27 to Friday 31 October 2025 // Lavanderia a Vapore, Collegno (TO)
ARIA brings together a group of artists and curators around the challenge of imagining a vaporous space in which to sketch alternative geographies of being together. The artists who will contribute to this process are: Anna Basti, Adriana Borriello, B. Bordoni, Francesca Cinalli, Christopher Serebour, with contributions from Doriana Crema, Jija Sohn, and Salvo Lombardo.
WHY
The ARIA call for proposals stems from the transformation of the AiR call for proposals – artists in residence, which until now has provided forms of support for individual projects of artistic creation, now rethinking its function as a support for a collective research residency, shared with the host institution, questioning together questions and formats to be opened up to extended communities.
Can an institution offer itself as a vital infrastructure in times of crisis of the collective body, as a call to its civic role?
The ARIA call is designed as a breath of fresh air, to open the lungs and open up new horizons to broad encounters and rearticulation of critical imagination in times of great change.
The invitation to participate is designed for those who are questioning the transformation of their practices, methods and the need to imagine relational spaces that reinvent being together, reverberating the questions that drive the Lavanderia a Vapore.
Lavanderia and its staff engage in the residency itself as an opportunity to rethink its organisational models through a porous and reciprocal attitude, aimed at questioning unilateral relationships and enabling other possibilities, other forms of systemic, synergic and horizontal relationships.
The ARIA-pilot call then becomes an opportunity to create new alliances and consonances between artists and curators working in organisations/institutions that share orientations and questions, stages and approaches to artistic development and growth and their role as agents of change in contemporary socio-political reality.
RESEARCH AND QUESTIONS
How can we imagine a free space in which we can lose ourselves and take time, lose track of it and be truly present, a lymphatic space in which our being together drains the waste that weighs us down and transforms it into new impulses?
What can be the plastic and social forms of living together according to principles of fluidity and transversality? How can we embody a system of affects by transforming it into a widespread political scenario?
How can institutions be intermediate bodies that become public spaces, offering the possibility of remedying the internal inconsistencies of structures?
Can we imagine them as air purifiers?
How can we oxygenate the wounds of an institution that wants to become connective tissue again?
Let us float between these questions and launch a new research path to create a vaporous landscape, with the head firmly on the ground and the body in the air.
A SPACE FULL OF STEAM… STEAM as a zone of nudity in which to lose the boundary of the single form, a fog bank that modifies the clarity of the gaze and of logic by opening up mysterious passages, a zone of disappearances and appearances, a humid space in which to glimpse changes of state.
We wish to give life to spaces that reaffirm the value of encounter and the sharing of sensations and emotions that speak to us of our being as well as doing, of time lost and found, and of the space in which fixed forms evaporate, edges and clarity of logic, to share fears and desires against the mode of pure survival by offering recurring moments of encounter to possible communities in transformation, to nurture a critical imaginary of possible futures by operating as a chamber of resonance and vaporisation.
Lavanderia a Vapore dreams of embodying its name, becoming a landscape of Steam
Steam as a draining system
steam as a clinic of beauty
steam as the conquest of blurriness
steam as the occlusion of the predatory gaze
steam as the inclusion of the unexpected
steam as a practice that remedies forms of absence and disappearance
steam as an activator of circulation
steam as a house that has loosened its valves
Starting from the personal we would like to get to the structural, starting from the artistic ecosystem we would like to offer the different possibilities we encounter, to the entire social body.
HOW IT WORKS
During the collective residency, we will use the principle of cohabitation in the same space, generating a place similar to an agora, an open frame, open to experimentation and transformation, to the exchange of practices and to the testing of some devices developed by the Lavanderia staff, such as the toolkit or the feedback, tools that facilitate rethinking and the generation of critical thinking also towards one’s own practice, which becomes the object of collective analysis and reflection.
The Lavanderia staff will be involved, as well as some of the artists associated with and inhabiting the spaces of Lavanderia a Vapore on a more continuous basis.
WHO WE ADDRESS
We are looking for artists and curators, resident in Italy, predominantly in the field of dance, with whom to imagine and experiment formats and spaces in which to facilitate the convergence of bodies, thoughts and visions beyond the romanticisation of harmony, in which to generate new organisms, offer existing communities and enhance ephemeral spaces of refuge, landing and revitalisation.
Profiles interested in the questions posed by the call, and wishing to develop experimental spaces and formats to create a mode of encounter to be tested with other groups and that can be transmitted and declined by others in other contexts.
WHAT WE OFFER
The Aria Call for Proposals offers a financial contribution of EUR 2,500 plus VAT if due, for the entire period per artist or curator, including expenses.
OW TO PARTICIPATE
To participate, you should
• be available during the identified period, for the entire duration of the residency (10 days)
• be in possession of an individual VAT number or have the possibility of requesting support from an association with a VAT number that can issue electronic invoices.
HOW TO APPLY
• Fill in Annex A, convert it into PDF format and sign it
• Attach an image in JPG format that the artist associates with these applications and/or a vaporous space
• Send both materials via PEC to lavanderiapdv@pec.it, and in copy, for information, to estdahl@lavanderiaavapore.eu. The time of receipt of the PEC shall serve as proof.
• The subject line of the certified e-mail message must state ‘Bando ARIA 2025’.
PLEASE ATTACH PDF AND JPG FILES (weighing no more than 10 MB) and send your application by 12.00 noon on 08/08/2025.
The results will be communicated by email by 7/09/2025.
For information:
Anna Estdahl | estdahl@lavanderiaavapore.eu by 31/07.
