All’ombra dei fiori nessuno era estraneo agli altri estranei 

Participative Performance / Workshop

All’ombra dei fiori nessuno era estraneo agli altri estranei
In the shade of flowers, no one was a stranger to other strangers

(Kobayashi Issa)

The workshop focuses on the themes of listening as a collective practice and proxemics, a semiological discipline that studies the human use of space and the effects that it has on behaviour, nonverbal communication, body movement, and social interaction. The aim of the workshop is to enact a performance entirely self-managed by the participants, based on psychological, non-verbal, and proximity variables that interpose between themselves, the others, and the space. Sound, uncontrolled gestures, and facial expressions will be the only channels of communication between the participants, who will determine the development of the performance with its unpredictable and apparently chaotic nature. Crushed and trapped in a virtual space that in recent years has become increasingly smaller and cramped, the workshop aims to recover the physical-spatial dimension to give room to the inner language, expressed through the practice of sound; the occupation of places, inhabited temporarily by the bodies and sounds produced, wants to re-establish communication flows and generates intimacies to share with the others. The workshop is inspired by the social organisation of ants, whose collective behaviour is formed by shared identities that define themselves as self-functioning units without an internal command. The complex action of ants derives from a collective intelligence – called superorganism – formed by unsophisticated agents. In the same way, simple gestures and small actions aimed to generate acoustic events will create shared complexities. The sacrifice of the ant individual, the articulated communication system through olfactory/taste perception and finally the horizontal organisation of the castes will be the elements that constitute the syntax of the performance.