2023

In collaboration with Elena Barison

Performers: İnci Atabey, Elena Barison, Sara Caruso, Ekin Çifter

Recording: Mengjie Zhang, Annachiara Mezzanini​

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How can language change over time? What is the power of speech in the construction of thought along with social and behavioral patterns? The analysis of the possible metamorphoses of language, the interconnections between meanings, the desemantization of the word and its role in Italian neo-feminism are the specificities through which this project emerged. The research measures brought upon performative dimensions of rituals, firstly, as a result of the reciprocal bodily component, and secondly, because of its linguistic and sound components.

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"Walk a poem...with us" was born as a gesture devoted to being as individual as it is shared: a circular walk performed by four women who for hours alternately repeat excerpts from Gertrude Stein's poem Sacred Emily (1913) exploring the transformative potential of poetry that is capable of changing the senses, feelings and behavior of those performing the action, reaching a new state of consciousness. Our gesture, with the purpose of generating a transformation, is itself in a continuous change; the initial reflection on language turned to poetry as a literary product composed of words that can be repeated, twisted and disintegrated to such an extent that they lose their everyday meaning, becoming only sound. 

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The installation of the action reconstructs the performance in a tangible way: the linguistic component of the poem is rendered with a sound system, while the visual one on a moving record player, the latter instrument further leading back to the sound. The audience is not only a viewer of the performance, but also an activator of its new existential phase, one in which it could potentially become ritual over time.