NON | 2024
a performative environment, Centrale Fies, Italy
sound by Simone Schiavo
voice by Alessia Berti
critical essay by Marta Federici
with contributes by:
Soukaina Abur
Isa Borelli
Cecilia Dalla Negra
Dalia Maini aka DMT
and a speciale appearance by Giulia Crispiani
NON (NOT) is generated by the need to explore the space opened by negation, that is, the multiple possibilities of existing by rejecting definitions and categories that are asphyxiated and repressive.
NON is generated by the daily tension of being and doing in this devastating and inhuman present.
NON is a declaration of love and anger, an attempt to inhabit and explore the crisis through an action shared live with the audience.’
A ten-meter-long roll of drawing paper becomes a stage inhabited by creatures whose features and positions spontaneously elude predefined models.
I draw the outlines of these figures by passing the markers along the borders of my body. I use the peel of a freshly eaten banana or a rock stolen from the river to draw new organs, limbs, protrusions.
This primordial identity game seems to manifest everything that is not tangible and visible, as if the ghosts that inhabit me, the abuses clinging to my skin, the rage nestling in my throat and the battles of love are revealed on the paper. In the constant attempt to determine these always elusive boundaries, my body opens up and falls apart to become something other than itself, to be everything it apparently is not, could not be, but would like to become.
Parallel to my constant drawing, the environment is crossed and operated by two other agent.
The musician Simone Schiavo is invited to compose a live score where different sound sources interfere with each other, as a way to give volume and space to the layering of information and emotions that populate the everyday.
The sounds captured live are mixed with fragments of the environmental recordings made during my residency in Fies, but also with the voices of Wojnarowicz, Jarman, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, as well as the testimonies that are shared daily via social media by the journalists still operating in Palestine.
Every half hour, a reader shares with the audience a series of selected texts.
Being in Time of War by Etel Adnan (2005) together with contributions from Soukaina Abrour, Isa Borelli, Cecilia Dalla Negra, and Dalia Maini are read aloud.
On the occasion of the presentation of the work at Centrale Fies, artist Giulia Crispiani read an unpublished text composed by bits of our correspondence over the previous months. The duration of the action coincides with the end of the paper roll. When finished, it is hung from the ceiling to leave room for the roll to be used the next day.
Get out of the house, of the self by Marta Federici
The space is that of a disused room in a hydroelectric power plant. Let’s imagine it as a living, porous architecture, which breathes, between the mountains and the river. An environment permeated by lights, echoes, intensities, and consistencies in continuous metamorphosis. An interstice, a crack, an inside-out. Let’s envision the air having an iridescent quality. The time is the present. Not a point along a line that unravels from a before to an after, but a here-and-now that exists within the fabric of fractal time, composed of a multiple series of interconnected presents. Internal rhythms and external rhythms intertwine. Time does not flow, it contracts and expands like a beating heart. The river flows. We could define NON as a performative environment. A scene opening in all directions, animated by currents, presences, and energies. A space-time in transformation, to be traversed and inhabited. There are sounds. There are words. There is the body. The present body of those who act and those who do not, of those who listen, those who wait. Here, even the skin reveals itself as a porous boundary, a surface permeable to the wind, fluids, relationships, and resonances.
Within this space-time of becoming, Davide Savorani reflects on the possibility of existing, still, amidst the echoes of a world that is failing and collapsing. To exist, by refusing to conform to categories and definitions, escaping arbitrary norms and binary schemes (subject/object, man/woman, human/animal), which consolidate relations of subordination and domination in the personal, social, and political sphere, and define the structures of «coherence» and «continuity» of personhood – where any incoherence or discontinuity is reduced to a state of dehumanization and abjection. This investigation takes place quite literally on the surface of the skin, in an exercise of anatomical disarticulation/recomposition that combines drawing and movement, signaling – as philosopher Angela Puntino wrote, thinking with Foucault – that «power is not such because it subjugates supposedly free consciences, but because it seizes the bodies, the bodies that we are».
With careful and precise gestures on paper rolls laid on the ground, the artist traces the outline of his arms, a head, two heads, the tip of the tongue, genital organs, a banana peel, buttocks, breasts, the arch of a curled back: parts of an exploded body that are reassembled into landscapes as vast as horizons, which do not simply represent or describe; instead, they invent anatomies that are still alien to the catalog of the real, where erogenous zones bloom and multiply.
This corporeality, overflowing and prolific, asserts a desire for vitality – a vitality of desire – which blends rage and love, embraces and heals traumas and wounds, making it clear that Savorani’s NON does not have a nihilistic inclination. The negation expressed by the artist reclaims instead the need to work with/resist those conditions of ‘im/possibility’ that the dominant culture imposes on those who do not conform to the phantom of normative citizenship: to exist/resist, without giving into the promises of shelter that roles and identities offer, remaining in contact with the precariousness of a desperately alive movement that is constantly slipping towards the shadowy areas of the unexpected and the unspeakable.
Because the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house — Audre Lorde affirmed while confronting the prejudices of an academic, heterosexual, and white feminism, to underline that oppression cannot be destroyed if, during the fight, the same violent and divisive logic that fuels it is replicated. I must forsake ‘home’ (comfort zones, both personal and cultural) every day of my life to keep burgeoning into the tree of myself. — Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, imagining a reconfiguration of identities as mutable and mobile structures, which welcome within themselves those who are other than them (nos/otras).
To get out of the house, of the self — Etel Adnan noted in a long list of thoughts-actions that trace the daily impulses and skids of a self witnessing the devastation of war. While we inhabit NON, we can carry with us the voices of these poets and thinkers. In their words, the old house and the self emerge as spaces of the known to leave behind, breaking free from social and personal cages to walk toward change, to branch out and interconnect, to shake and lose ourselves, before finding ourselves elsewhere. Let’s then try to think of NON as the still unknown house where we would like to plan to meet. We can envision it as an evolving and never-finished architecture, where doors and windows are always open and the arrangements can be reconfigured by every visitor. A house-piazza, where the body is not isolated but exposed, encounters other bodies and blends with them. Where being and doing become one in the struggle. Where voices resonate in polyphonies, as language unfolds, striving to free itself from the clear boundaries of meaning, in pursuit of the visionary and trembling quality of the poetic word.
Note: This text was written with the programmatic intention of intertwining references to numerous authors, listed at the bottom of the page, in the desire to call forth a chorus of voices and to allow the echoes of certain words to spread in multiple directions.
Translation by Angelica Bollettinari
