17.11.2011

Motus_ZONE at Santarcangelo Festival [2012<2014]

In a central and visible place (to be defined) we’ll be setting up an “ephemeral camp”, a sort of “Hostel” designed, inhabited and run by artists’ collectives, also with the collaboration of architects, stage designers and landscape gardeners.




A Zone “built” by performers, writers, documentary filmmakers, journalists, thinkers and citizens of the Mediterranean area, particularly from countries undergoing processes of radical cultural and social transformation, from the Maghreb to Spain and the Balkans and of course Italy… to share their personal artistic and life experiences with “the Festival inhabitants”.




We are witnessing a process of invigoration of the imagination of young people from these countries, because after the revolts – over and above the differing results – a creative energy was unleashed that is wholly new and overwhelming.




The project hinges precisely on the idea of communion and participation:




-       “Colonisation” of a building where there will be a calendar of dates great and small, set out in synchronisation with the events of the whole Festival. A sort of creative camp functioning in accordance with heterotopic modes: a floating zone that can be “visited and experienced”. In fact it will be a place of temporary residence, open to festival visitors who may decide to stay there (for a few hours or days), living and sleeping in the rooms/shelter. The idea of immersion in an environment through living there gets us away from the classic dynamic/contract of spectacular commercialisation.  The place will be scattered with signs and presences. But to perceive them you have to stay there, have to enter and spend time.




-       Construction and management of the space (and time) will take on a participative and shared form.                                                          Motus will not be directing but rather acting as catalyst, facilitating encounters and reactions: putting the artists in the condition to express themselves with freedom and trust.  The aim is to get artists involved in the process who practise non-pyramidal forms of organisation, who seek to go beyond the boundaries: “To go where there’s something that breaks the order, that yearns for change. Because it is in intermediate space, in the white between two blacks, that real things exist.” Leïla Shahid




The idea of building an independent Zone is the metaphorical formula that best embodies our current artistic activities in relation to the theatre system itself. Or better, to use an equation, the Zone is to the Festival what Motus is to Theatre.




It’s immersed in the whole festival, a festival to which we owe our own formation, with which we have been breathing in synchrony for years… but at the same time it lives its own life.




We’ve always conceived our theatre as a space of welcome and listening, as an instrument for “recording” the convective movements that are animating and disturbing the new generations above all…




We have often and more and more frequently turned towards people who are far from the theatre, who have other reference universes and are suspicious of artistic doings…                                                                                                                                                                         To arouse amazement and interest in someone who has never set foot in a theatre is worth more to us than a thousand reviews by insiders who feed on theatre alone… This challenge with the “outside world” is what urges us on, changing formats and languages very rapidly, surfing through codes…




The strategy is research in the field, almost anthropological. Welcoming rather than organising, listening rather than passing judgements.

It’s a dramaturgical practice.


« If one thinks that a ship after all is a fragment of floating space, a place without place, and that it is at the same time given over to the infinity of the sea, and that from port to port… from one brothel to another, it presses on towards the colonies to seek the most precious things concealed in their gardens, one understands why for our culture the ship has not only been the greatest tool of economic development but also the greatest store of imagination. The vessel is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilisations without ships, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and police take the place of pirates. » M. Foucault, Eterotopie, in: Archivio Foucault, Milan, Feltrinelli 1998