The Body Alliances

A program of urban dances, performances, workshops and sharing participatory processes carried out in the Padua Street neighborhood activates a collective experience around the theme of care and performativity of bodies in the public sphere.

Artistic practice becomes a field of aesthetic and cognitive confrontation on which to engage, a moment of encounter and contamination between different audiences, of accessibility to culture in contexts hardly open to contemporary languages. A reversal of perspective, as an act of cultural decolonization, will allow minorities, of gender, social background and origin, to become central to the categories of visibility and invisibility of bodies, and to construct relationships other than those active in the urban perimeter to which they are usually connected.

The project combines the performance, installation and spectacle part with moments of body, performance and theoretical training through a program of intensive workshops and a symposium, carried out in collaboration with BASE, with the aim of deepening reflection in horizontal forms.

The body and care are in this context placed at the center of a debate concerning the city, its institutions, and the stratifications of the signs of economic and political power on bodies, with the aim of bringing together the important experiences gained over the past year, and comparing, in a horizontal and shared dialogue among the participants, artistic and relational practices, academic reflections and forms of activism, mutualism and interdependence matured in different contexts.

State of Care Symposium

Edited by Maria Paola Zedda in dialogue with Linda Di Pietro

A space for horizontal theoretical (and performative) reflection where artists, curators, project participants, philosophers, anthropologists and performance theorists discuss the performativity of the body as an agent of transformation of urban space and the public sphere, strategies for decolonizing bodies and aesthetic codes, and care as a common good, universal right and community practice.

The symposium, in collaboration with BASE and MUDEC, experiments with tools of horizontal restitution, of experimental pedagogy, flanking theoretical debate with moments of performative and relational experience.

Profiling itself as a case study of the relationship between the body, vulnerability and precarity, the symposium reflects issues of cultural relevance and is therefore also aimed at students of academies and universities particularly Department of Cultural Anthropology of Milano Bicocca University, Students of Social Sciences, Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, Scuola Civica Paolo Grassi and the world.