Domus, in continuity and coherence with its intentions, launches in partnership with Atelier Essenza its 2022 programme with an ambitious project titled PERFORM(HER). The 2022 edition aims to discuss, develop and disseminate knowledge and studies on performing art, starting from the local phenomenon of Tarantismo.

Starting from Tarantismo as a total social phenomenon, this year Domus will try to restore the performative logics of possessed bodies assigned to rituals of dispossession, but deviating from them just as much, by reversing these logics through a politics of gestures. Logics of emancipation of possessed bodies have been put forward by contemporary feminist theories and one of the challenges of this week’s residency will be to propose the outline of these logics by articulating them with artistic performances. Fragmentary visual languages, unexpected encroachments and precarious balances are at the heart of contemporary art, and performance is the perfect artistic expression in which to bring together these fundamental characteristics that have pulverised canons. In performance, the action of the artist is closely connected to the experience of the audience in a mutual exchange of offering and inner transformation.

The female performing artist continuously stages herself through action as in a sort of psychoanalytical session in which the body is the absolute protagonist. The female body is a body in itself, women do not have a body, they are a body and this body is a creative instrument not only from a biological point of view but also from the point of view of thoughts, and the performance is the sublimation of an individual path which, by showing itself, becomes a collective experience.

Perform(her) will incorporate in its three days of embodied study the voices of an ample spectrum of thinkers, activists, and practitioners from diverse social, political, and cultural backgrounds. Widening the project’s theoretical and performative reflections and situating the project’s territory of Galatina in a broader international network of reflections, practices, urgencies.

An essential component of PERFORM(HER)’s process is its polyphonic approach, its thinking/doing as a collectivity and in direct exchange with the surrounding territory of Apulia. In this direction goes also the second moment of the project: two days of collective restitution across Galatina (one dedicated to performance and another dedicated to video projection work). PERFORM(HER) will reconsider the possibilities of embodied cultural and social justice. The intersectional approach connects individual experiences to a broader network of alliances: Galatina to the Mediterranean and other Souths of the globe, and Tarantismo to a lineage of multiple resistances that defy patriarchal and heteronormative characterisations of colonial descent.

Text written by Fabienne Brugère, Ilaria Conti, Romina De Novellis, Mariacristina Lattarulo, Guillaume le Blanc, Paola Ugolini.