Yvonne Rainer, Cesare Pietroiusti, Cristina Kristal Rizzo, Diana Anselmo, Francesca Grilli, Azzurra D’Agostino, Virgilio Sieni, Giuseppe Comuniello
where language moves
12.13.2025 – 02.15.2026
Yvonne Rainer, Cesare Pietroiusti, Cristina Kristal Rizzo, Diana Anselmo, Francesca Grilli, Azzurra D’Agostino, Virgilio Sieni, Giuseppe Comuniello
where language moves
12.13.2025 – 02.15.2026
Where Language Moves is a pathway of workshop-based and performative practices curated by studioconcreto, presented in collaboration with Teatro Koreja.
Lecce, December 13, 2025 – February 15, 2026
Within the performative practices presented in Where Language Moves, the body emerges as a vector of a distinct sensible intelligence, where gesture, perception, and language intertwine to generate a continuous dynamic of research and critical reflection. In this context, the hand assumes a dual function: on one hand, it manifests in its primary dimension as material and sensorial articulation; on the other, as a semiotic and political device capable of renegotiating regimes of signification and shaping processes of meaning-making. The hand becomes a threshold, a point of contact, a site through which the world inscribes traces on the body, and from which the body itself activates practices of sense.
In their performative, workshop, and installation formats, the research of the involved artists interrogates modes of bodily presence, relation, and communication, giving shape to shared spaces of imagination and knowledge construction. In these works, gesture—whether anti-choreographic, oracular, or poetic—does not merely produce formal configurations but opens alternative possibilities of presence, relation, and listening. Thus unfold margins for a non-codified language: non-hierarchical, non-normative, yet expressive, situated, and transformative.
Through its minimal exploration, Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966) restores the hand as pure muscular and material presence, unbound from any narrative or communicative purpose. In the video work, the hand is the solitary protagonist: its movement, devoid of function, asserts a bodily autonomy that resists the codification of meaning. It is precisely in the act of freeing gesture from function that the subversive force of Rainer’s work concentrates. During the opening of Where Language Moves, a performative lecture by Cesare Pietroiusti introduced Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie.
Gesture becomes word in Monumentum DA, where Diana Anselmo and Cristina Rizzo activate a dialogue between dance and Italian Sign Language (LIS). In this convergence, the hand serves as a linguistic, choreographic, and political instrument: through LIS—a language historically marginalized by phonocentric and ableist dynamics—a new possibility emerges to embody language.
In Francesca Grilli’s Sparks, the hand transforms into a surface of reading, a space where the future is imagined and interpreted. The practice of chiromancy, entrusted to children who guide adults in the action, inverts the axis of knowledge transmission. Childhood becomes a performative subject and interpreter of the possible, in a gesture that is at once poetic and political.
With Danza Cieca, Virgilio Sieni further expands the reflection on gesture as a form of haptic knowledge: here, touch is not merely a compensation for sight but an autonomous and sensible epistemology. A research that extends across the layers of the human soul, activating an intimate and profound relation grounded in tactility, proximity, and the possibility of encountering the sensible otherness of the other.