Scuola Popolare
Performance of words between gesture and architecture
01.06.2020 – 07.06.2020
Scuola Popolare
Performance of words between gesture and architecture
01.06.2020 – 07.06.2020
The approach is inspired by the methodologies of radical pedagogy. The intent is to deconstruct words by means of performative actions that explore their etymology, meanings and possible translation among different semantic and disciplinary fields. The wider scope is to open up a reflection about language, and about what goes beyond language and constitutes the foundation of it: words, gestures, architecture. It is first of all an encounter among bodies, going back to the heroic role of the streets. In turn, this is the prerequisite for the reawakening of the apparent need of community-making.
The Governmental Decree of 9 March 2020 has imposed new proxemics and the main tenets of the project have been shaken. Words like closeness, body, or contact become taboos and gain – respectively – the meaning of prohibited act, untouchable object, unacceptable thought. For reasons of decency and health, the oral cavity, just like the word produced by the pharyngeal apparatus, becomes the infecting vector to be avoided. Thus, the anatomy of emergency unfolds, whereby immunity tastes like interdiction or spillover. Taking breath, holding it, staying in a state of suspended-ness until a date to-be-defined.
Beating time. Occupying time. Counting time. Slowing down time. Allowing time to time. Impose an order to yourself, and have no problem in disobeying it, in seclusion disobedience is a due act. By putting your elbow on a horizontal board, take the hand to the level of your eyes. Turn the arm left, turn it slowly to the right. Try to remember what you could eventually be able to do. Try to create something not to be shared or shown to anyone else. Look attentively at a screen close to you, something is dying.
Eyesight becomes blurry and words multiply, beyond truth and falsity, so that the only observation point on reality is a screen. In the era of hyper-visibility, hyper-representative virtual spaces get voraciously consecrated. The surplus of contents reflect the mechanism of compulsive consumption and the inconsistency within which the body implodes, while silence communicates a much-needed going back to the depth of the body, of its articulations, muscles, overloaded eyes, towards a condition that we thought we could be able to observe from the outside. To define presence, to feel the weight of the responsibility for each word, each gesture, each architecture. Do not struggle to understand if the world has really changed or if it will go back as it used to be, try to live moments of un-reflection. The outcomes of the act of suspending are never predictable, hence they run the risk of failure.
Scuola Popolare – Performance di parola tra gesto e architettura is a cycle of performative lectures held in the streets by artists that use words as the focus of their research. The project by studioconcreto won the prize “Creative Living Lab – II Edizione” of the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity and Urban Regeneration, however it is currently suspended due to health emergency.