Avvenimento #3
The conclusion of the public programs organized alongside the exhibition Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space saw the Peggy Guggenheim Collection present Avvenimento #3, an evening that transformed the museum into a transdisciplinary space for different media—from performance to dance, music, and installation.
On September 9, 2025, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni opened its gates to the independent art scene to interpret and fulfill Peggy Guggenheim’s wish to create “a research laboratory for new ideas . . . serving the future instead of recording the past.”
Organized by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Curated by Edoardo Lazzari.
Technical direction and installation design by Cosimo Ferrigolo, in collaboration with Giulio Polloniato (sound) and Andrea Sanson (lights).
Visual identity and graphics by Paola Momentè and Irene Sgarro.
Special thanks to Fondazione di Venezia.
Media partner: Mousse Magazine.
The title of this edition of Avvenimento, Nos Bastidores do Estudo (“Behind the Scenes of the Studio”), drew from the language of theater to focus on the “backstage,” not as a functional and technical space, but a critical and expressive one—a space for inquisitiveness, preparation, suspension, and intimacy. Portuguese was chosen deliberately, a poetic license that stood as tribute to the origins of the artist that was the subject of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space, an exhibition that encouraged explorations of the studio as a space, an action, and an emotional state in which processes take precedence over complete forms and the shadow of practice anticipates or exceeds the visibility of the artwork.
Nos Bastidores do Estudo was an open scoresheet taking place over three acts, a script with times and trajectories like a director’s notebook that held together apparitions and disappearances, pauses and surging energies. The first act opened in a subtle, counter-spectacular form with the performances of Royal Divorce and Luca Gerry Conte. During the intermission—a space for anticipation— Rac Montoro weaved iconic public figures from the past and the present in a symbolic astral constellation that beame a meeting place for individual vulnerabilities and collective participation. In the second act, three apparitions succeeded one another in the museum's sculpture garden, like waves of memories and proximity: Teodora Grano, Annamaria Ajmone and Sofia Naglieri. Thanks to the installation design created by Cosimo Ferrigolo, the technical infrastructure was also an active part of the event: modulated in real time, light took on dramaturgical agency and transformed the scene into an open set in continuous flux.
The studio—in the deep and encompassing meaning evoked by the title—was the threshold where all these practices emergeed from and return to. A place for gestation and friction, a liminal space where uncertainty, desire, expectation, and transformation coexisted. As expressed by Maria Helena Viera da Silva, the meaning of a work is revealed in the hidden threads that move us and in the machinery that organizes the visible. Avvenimento existed in these spaces, creating a performative atlas made up of unstable devices, partial apparitions, and sensitive crossings.
The performances
The First Breath on Earth And its Subsequent Sublime Collapse
by Royal Divorce
The First Breath on Earth and Its Subsequent Sublime Collapse was the performance that marked the end of the dramaturgy workshop exploring the liminal spaces of the digital universe through collective listening, dispersed memories, and virtual archives. By activating a series of comments on music videos uploaded to YouTube, the platform's comment section emerged as a dramaturgical territory inhabited by the voices from the web's interstices. These same voices animated the performance, which focused on the ambivalence between public and private and empathy and algorithm in the digital world.
Royal Divorce is a collective established in 2023. Following a visual logic based on discarded imagery and its hauntological power, Royal Divorce explores the systemic crisis of representation, the clash between historical and digital archives, giving rise to landscapes that skirt the boundaries between visual installation and performance. Amateur images and texts found on the web become a vehicle to explore the impact that digital archives have on the collective and individual imagination. Royal Divorce consists of Teresa Barbagallo, Angelo Licciardello, and Sebastiano Sicurezza.
Solve at Coagula
by Luca Gerry Conte
Solve et Coagula was an installation that explored the relationship between time, transformation, and perception through gastronomic practices and organic processes. The work was spread over two environments: in the first, the audience was invited to participate in a ritual of gathering and depositing; in the second, the transformation of matter and a tasting took place. This cyclical gesture, suspended between cultural symbology and organic life, posed questions regarding the sensorial limits of forms, drawing on alchemical knowledge and situating it in present. The installation behaved like a temporary organism connecting space, time, and presence, drawing attention to what mutates slowly, beyond our intentions.
Luca Gerry Conte explores art as an integral part of spatial and social ecosystems. He uses food as a medium for material and poetic transformation, activating situations related to daily life. His research, which is simultaneously alchemical and multisensory, investigates the relationships between matter, space, and ecological conscience, between decay and rebirth.
A Trouble at Night is Not Your Karmic Wound
by Rac Montoro
A Trouble at Night is Not Your Karmic Wound was a lecture-performance that reflected on the collective karmic wound through the natal charts of iconic and contradictory figures such as Peggy Guggenheim, Brittany Murphy, and Britney Spears. Using astrology as a narrative and political device, the performance weaved storytelling, oral notes, and moments of shared listening. The audience was encouraged to express their thoughts on what collectively harms us, contributing to the creation of a choral prophecy for the Age of Aquarius. A communal, transformative exercise, inspired by the question put forward by Paul B. Preciado in Dysphoria Mundi: “The question is not who are we, but what will we transform into?”
Rac Montoro is a trans non-binary artist and independent researcher. His practice develops in performances, writing, esoteric practices, exploring intra-subjective thought and astrology and political and ritualistic devices. His work has been presented at Kühlhaus, Berlin; Fondazione Merz, Torin; Latte Project Space, Faenza; Galleria Più e Parsec, Bologna.
Daughters
by Tedora Grano
I have a daughter, but I am not her mother.
And we share no part of our genetic background.
It’s me who looks so much like her.
When people ask what we are to each other, we don’t know what to say.
We look at each other.
And smile. That smile is a secret word.
In Daughters, starting from an intimate and personal matter, Teodora Grano investigated forms that still have no name, deflagrating the concept itself of what it means to be daughters. The story of a family bond that exists beyond biology. This investigation explored the relationship between writing and dance, not as distinct languages, but as two bodies treated like living matter. Through elements of choreographic and literary writing, the work challenged the univocal conception of filiation and reflected on relationships which were yet to been defined.
Teodora Grano is an author, performer, and researcher. She has worked across theater and circus, and practiced performance and dance, in more and less orthodox formats, with no permanent base. Her research is focused on the idea of a future literature, where the relationship between writing and body centers the act of reading as a space for investigation and transformation. 50% punk, 30% ironic, 20% really serious.
Conception, texts, and movement: Teodora Grano
Sound composition: Massimo Pupillo
Technical care: Simone Argianini
Artistic support: Arianna Lodeserto (editor), Marco Calzolari (projections), and Daria Greco (movement research)
Performance selected for the Vetrina della giovane danza d’autore 2024
With the support of CollettivO CineticO Progetto IPERCINETICO; SupportER - Rete Anticorpi Emilia-Romagna; L’arboreto - Teatro Dimora, Mondaino; Teatro Petrella, Longiano; Collettivo Amigdala / Ovestlab; Teatro Comunale di Ferrara; Around a Process of Making – Marosi.
Technical residence téchne 2023 - Lavanderia a Vapore.
Senza Titolo
by Annamaria Ajmone and Fabio Quaranta
The Senza titolo performance took on different forms, tones, and durations. The composition was not predefined and the architecture was not altered: it was their form that generated rhythms and trajectories, together with the audience's presence and movement. Curated by Fabio Quaranta, the outfits come from the Urania collection and contributed to the composition as extensions of the body. Materials, lines, and volumes engaged with the surrounding atmosphere and contributed to the perception of time and distance. In the sculpture garden of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, the body engaged with angles, thresholds, surfaces, and different levels, giving form to movement constructed in real time. The audience's postures constantly altered the action’s forms, which remodulated in relation to unpredictability.
Annamaria Ajmone is a dancer. Her research centers on the body, understood as malleable and mutable matter. Her investigations manifest in tentacular manner in different formats and durations, the result of collective work emerging from meetings and discussion. She has presented her works at several performing arts festivals, museums, and atypical spaces. She curates the program of Motelsalieri. Her work is dedicated to the transmission of practices and knowledge, devising formats that can generate exchanges of knowledge.
Fabio Quaranta is a fashion designer and the founder of MOTELSALIERI, an interdisciplinary space and a school of fashion and non-creative practices that explores fashion as a common language between art, music, and performance. He teaches at Iuav University of Venice and coordinates the Master's Degree in Menswear Design at the Academy of Costume and Fashion in Rome, in collaboration with Brioni. His recent projects include Urania, which continues his research by pushing fashion beyond an individual aesthetic dimension toward a shared vocabulary where clothing becomes a vehicle for stories, time, and the body.
Devozioni per occasioni di emergenza
by Sofia Naglieri
Living without illnesses, never feeling pain, feeling good all the time: no one has experienced this. Devozioni per occasioni di emergenza explored pain and sickness through a theatrical and performative investigation happening, literally, on stage: a giant body, overturned, vulnerable, imploded, that contained, conserved, was filled with sacks. It was filled and emptied. It carried everything related to us in time and space. Sickness was the subject of the story: it took shape, took on a voice, and took on appearances. What are the words to tell the story of our sick selves? The title refers to the moment we are ready to believe anything, as we wait for someone, or something, to save us. When I get sick, I pray.
Sofia Naglieri is a performer and author with a degree in psychology. Her research and actions take place in the realm of performative arts, on and off the stage. She has designed collective and relational works in public spaces, experimenting with festivity and its ramifications in institutional and underground contexts. Since 2023 she collaborates with the DOM theater company and the Alix Mautner collective and is the co-founder of the collective ClimaLite with Tommaso Falivene. Chiara Boitani is her ally and collaborator.
In collaboration with Sofia Bordin, Chiara Boitani, and Valentina Consiglio
Costumes: Sofia Bordin and Valentina Consiglio, with the help of Silvia Pambianchi, Vita Mees, Selene
Sound: Portamento
Project selected by Powered by REF 2024, Romaeuropa Festiva
Supported by Nothing, Cenci Casa Laboratorio, and Porto Simpatica
Edoardo Lazzari is an independent curator, educator, and PhD candidate in Performative Studies at the Sapienza University of Rome, where his research investigates the use of assembly devices in the arts as instituting processes and ecological politics of coexistence. His practice weaves curation, pedagogy, and writing, activated in institutional and independent spaces. He has designed programs in museums such as the Pinault Collection and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and MUDAM in Luxembourg, as well as in independent contexts such as Biennale Urbana and Venere in Teatro in Venice and Fondazione Lac o Le Mon in Lecce. He collaborates with Iuav University of Venice and regularly holds lectures in schools and academies. In 2019 he co-founded the Extragarbo collective, and in 2025 was a research fellow at Scuola Piccola Zattere in Venice. He contributes to various Italian and international journals and publications.
Cosimo Ferrigolo is a researcher, stage manager, and spatial designer. After completing his studies in Set Design at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia and in Theater and Performative Arts at IUAV University of Venice, he began exploring the relationships between scenography, performance, and urban spaces. His research centers on the contribution of artistic practices to regeneration through a collective interdisciplinary approach, and stage spaces and their various articulations. Since 2022 he is a doctoral candidate in Regional Planning and Local Public Policy at Iuav University of Venice. Since 2021 he has been a stage manager for the OHT theater company. In 2019 he co-founded the Extragarbo artistic and curatorial collective.
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