Avvenimento #2
Did I Love a Dream?

by Danila Gambettola, in collaboration with Ulisse Schiavo

Cu*mmia*1 is the beginning of a magical and political self-defense process that remedies and redeems the social and cultural abandonment of a region and those inhabiting it. It is manifested in the reshaping of the subordinate and marginal Italian South, where bodies inhabit a promiscuous space between magic and the ordinary. The performance unfolds through continual alterations of presence that activate connections and disconnections with emotional memories, premonitions, and spectral matter. The work is part of an investigation of trans-magic, a speculative space where a state of abandonment and invisibility draws the emergence of imaginative and somatic practices that activate unusual and extraordinary behaviors in a system of relationships between human and nonhuman entities.

Cu*mmia*1 is a project created by Danila Gambettola in collaboration with Ulisse Schiavo, Giada Cipollone, Laura Pante, and Davide Savorani.

Danila Gambettola is a dancer, performer, and researcher engaged in a transdisciplinary practice that aims to challenge preconceived notions of choreography by overlapping dramaturgical fragments involving movement, vocalizations, writing, and installation components. She has worked as a performer for The Soul Expanding Universe #2 (Ocean Space, Venice), Encyclopedia of Relationships by Alessandra Pirici (Art Biennale 2022, Venice), and Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies (Pinault Collection, Venice).

Ulisse Schiavo is a musician and performer. A longstanding interest in the intersection of different branches of learning has led him since 2015 to focus on what has become one of the foundations of his practice: vocal experimentation. In 2022 he published the album Precious Silver Grace (Dischi Sotteranei, DURO), which he has presented at various festivals, including Buffalo (The Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome and the Diocletian Baths, Rome), youTHeater (Teatro al Parco, Mestre), and in shows at Germi Ldc, Milan; Spazio Punch, Venice; and Locomotive Club, Bologna.

by Allison Grimaldi Donahue

The New Orpheus consists in three poetic moments investigating the birth, or rather, the creation and nurturing of a poetic voice. Taking inspiration from Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus (1950), Allison Grimaldi Donahue has created two sound installations, produced with the participants of a workshop held at the museum. The first, installed in three different points of the garden, is an elaboration on Robert Duncan’s The Venice Poem (1965), including translations and choral readings; the other is a longer track, installed on the terrace on the Grand Canal, on the nature of poetry and each of our relationships with writers of the past. The third poetic intervention is a live reading by Grimaldi Donahue of her original poetry contemplating how a poet is born, how poetic language originates, and how each writer serves as a medium or filter for the voices of the world.

The New Orpheus was born from the poems written by Andrea Antonello, Rachele Bortot Borghero, Daniela Conte, Silvio Crosera, Lucca De Clario, Lucia Fontanelli, Adelaide Gnecchi, Doriana Alba Granzotto, Bianca Maria Negrini, Angelica Racco, Irene Woodbury, and Martina Zullo.

Allison Grimaldi Donahue is a writer and artist. She is the author of Body to Mineral (2016) and On Endings (2019), and the translator of  Blown Away (2021) by Vito M. Bonito and Self Portrait (2021) by Carla Lonzi. She has held poetic performances at Cross Project, Verbania; Kunsthalle Bern; Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich; Die Sonnenstube, Lugano; Short Theatre, Rome; MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome; MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; and Fondazione Giuliani, Rome. She lives in Bologna and teaches creative writing at various U.S. universities.

by Gabriele Rendina Cattani

La Voix humaine is a performance adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s 1930 single-actress drama of the same title. The performance consists of a phone conversation between a young man and his male lover, from whom he is separating and whose voice is never heard. Their dialogue is de facto a monologue: the public follows the call by listening to the young man’s words alone, while the other end of the line is a ghostly, vanishing presence coalesced into the phone. Like many other works by Cocteau, La Voix humaine investigates the failure of language, and the relationship between desire and technology. Every attempt to communicate is interrupted and altered by the machine that dismembers the human bodies in an intermittent game of transmissions and repetitions. The performance replaces the genders of the play in a male-male relationship, bringing to the fore the inner monologue of the protagonist and the homoerotic background in Cocteau’s original text. 

Gabriele Rendina Cattani incorporates family archives and personal objects in performances, videos, and installations to explore the construction, inheritance, and appropriation of narratives. His practice often adapts literary works as film-vignettes and tableaux vivants in which desire and the representation of sexuality hold a central role of aesthetic reflection. He studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, with Gerard Byrne from 2018 until 2024. Recently his work has been on view at Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin; MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen; Goethe Institute, Dublin; CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.

by Gianmaria Borzillo with Max_ine Simonetto

Femenine was envisioned after listening to the homonymous 1974 composition by Julius Eastman, a key figure in U.S. twentieth-century music who fell victim to a tragic death and was unjustly forgotten. This discovery ignited an urgency to create an open performative work, intended to be shared through artistic collaborations. The performance generates an active space which allows for a gradual understanding of the Other through a discovery of the self. This radically queer process organically brings to the fore intimacy and death, AIDS and sickness, transfiguration and the joy of eroticism, and solitude leading to disappearance. An oblique queer space, created for and by music, sees multiple layers flow and pour out into a coalescence that triggers confusion, frustration, and grace.

From an idea by Gianmaria Borzillo in collaboration with Max_ine Simonetto, Emma Saba, Gaia Ginevra Giorgi, Juri Bizzotto, and Johanna Robyn Closuit.

Gianmaria Borzillo is a dancer, performer, and director. His creative practice makes use of various media—dance, performance, literature, and cinema—driven by the need to create works dictated by expressive freedom. Indeed, his approach to art encourages shifts between different genres and disciplines while establishing and maintaining an open dialogue with the experiences and insights that emerge along the way.

Max_ine Simonetto (naturaviolenta – her/she/they) is a queer, trans, and non-binary artist and artisan. Their work encompasses floral design, performative arts, and costume design. They collaborate with Margherita Ferrari of Oddik Flower Farm and Studio in Vicenza and with artist Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin in Italy and abroad. Their practice merges forms of treatment, manual skills, upcycling, divination, and empowerment practices for queer and trans+ people.

Credits
Idea and creation: Gianmaria Borzillo
Performance: Max_ine Simonetto
Poetic script: Gaia Ginevra Giorgi
Research assistance: Paola Garanto
Visual research, graphics, and drawings: Juri Bizzotto
Costumes and floral design: Max_ine Simonetto
Curation and promotion: Giuls Traversi
Production: corpoceleste_C.C.00#
with the support of CENTQUATRE-PARIS, Snaporazverein, Italian Cultural Institute of Paris (IIC), Kilowatt Festival, Festival Oriente/Occidente, Milanoltre.

by Gérald Kurdian 

Hot Bodies Choir is a performance that gathers queer, trans, non-binary, and genderfluid people who joined a five-day collective writing and choral singing workshop led by Gérald Kurdian at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The unique, polyphonic, and unruly texts constitute the basis of a choral score—musically arranged by Kurdian—born from the exchange of experiences and ideas and inspired by queer, feminist, sex-positive, and decolonial manifestos.

Gérald Kurdian (they/them), aka Hot Bodies, studied visual arts at the École Nationale Supérieure de Paris-Cergy before entering the performance and contemporary dance program Ex.e.r.ce 07_Centre Chorégraphique National in Montpellier, directed by Mathilde Monnier and Xavier Le Roy. Their oblique concerts are opportunities to invent synergies between electronic music, performance art, and documentary practices. They are regularly presented in the contexts of visual arts, indie music, or performing arts. They have also composed radio-pieces with sex workers and music for films and contemporary dance. Since 2018, they have been developing the performative and musical research project Hot Bodies of the Future, which explores alternative forms of sexualities and queer micro-politics. 

by Est Coulon

À la recherche du temps perdu is a project based on a futile activity: in 2022, while staying in the house in which he grew up, Est Coulon began transcribing Marcel Proust’s homonymous novel on sheets of paper which he then glued together at the end of each daily writing session. He thus eventually created an endless accordion book, a paradoxical object which is unique but also worthless, and that acts as an archiving device capable of safeguarding the memory of the places that shape it. On the occasion of Avvenimento #2, the project takes the form of a performance staged for one individual at a time: by intimately engaging with the accordion book, each viewer activates their emotional and corporeal memory, transforming the object into a portal to other places and temporalities.

To view and join the performance, visitors can register on the evening of the event and wait their turn. The performance takes place in the spaces of the temporary exhibition and lasts 15 minutes.

Est Coulon (he/him) is the co-founder and an active member of Extragarbo and Call Monica, two collectives founded in Venice in 2019. His first show (call monica: call monica) debuted at Santarcangelo Festival in 2021. A trans artist, his research focuses on the exploration and re-elaboration of queer methodologies to stage anti-virtuosic gestures and intermedial transdisciplinary practices with the aim of subverting the concept of authorship. After contributing to various collective creative endeavors, through À la recherche du temps perdu Coulon engages in his first solo project.