art walks with generations
"Living poetically the world should be a pedagogic manifesto.
Who learns to feel rapture and radiance of things, generates in turn rapture and radiance, and causes destinies"
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Introduction to
Le Platrier Siffleur by Christian Bobin
U.R.C.A - RESEARCHING ABOUT MONSTERS
In the 2 years since the beginning of the process leading to the performance BOB, Matteo Marchesi together with the dramaturg Lucio Guarinoni and the musician Tommaso Esposito, have developed an explorative workshop about monsters with kids from 7 to 10 years old, in the public spaces of Arcene, a rural town in the country in between Milano and Bergamo.
This workshop has been a wild dive into the need to give bodies and qualities to creatures, to discover the depth of imagination as a tool for choreographic and visual creation.
Through the pretext of a call for monster researchers, the young community took the name of U.R.C.A. (Unity of Research for Creatures in Arcene) and worked as a fruitful playground for visual tools and physical games to embody the creatures emerging from the group.
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The U.R.C.A community produced a large amount of collages, human-size drawings, narrative texts and elements of brainstorming, now collected in a book preserved and accessible in the town pubblic library, and digital contents as videos and audio recordings part of the artist's archive.
This community based project, by multidisciplinary approaches to the experience of monster with supported by Qui e Ora Residenza Teatrale, Comune di Arcene and Biblioteca Civica di Arcene, kept feeding an archive of points of view on all of the diverse, bare, fragile, brave bodies that summons invention and creativity to generate a fair expression to their possible way to be inhabitants of their community and of the world they percieve beyond.
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BODY FREES ALL
In 2020 the approach on creation with different generations, that leaded to the production Bob, has been selected by the partners of Network AnticorpiXL in the programmed action Collaboraction Kids. Working through workshops and residencies Matteo met teenagers of different ages (from 12 to 19 y.o.) and cities in Italy, swinging trough the challenges of online and presence practices due to Covid time.
The original conviction was to explore the shades of freedom, that has become lately the core of Swollen Bodies performative project, and made explicit a specific need of teenagers to organically reconnect physical sensations and cognition of the surroundings towards forms of expressions and narratives that could be not pre-shaped and functionalized by a social context as in a constant challenge.
The practices of playfulness, motion through perception, exaggeration of expressive features, breathing and fun with sensitivity has delivered in time a playground to question what freedom could be by staying close to a personal and not competitive point of view, while someone around could watch. This is the inner and outer space where free individuality can be already a motor of transformation.