Gaia Giani (IT)
EXTRA FOCUS
IN COLLABORATION WITH Micamera
participatory performance, karaoke
DETAILED INFORMATION COMING SOON
ON HOW TO RESERVE THE MICROPHONE
132 moons, 2244 songs, 17 playlists, three years of love.
Then it’s all over.
What’s left?
Gaia Giani recounts her dream of love between Milan and Tucson in a performance – karaoke created to collectively process the end of a love affair.
It all begins with the 2244 tracks divided into 17 playlists created together with her ex-partner. What to do with them? Giani can no longer listen to them, but she can’t get rid of them either. She decides to start sharing them with her friends, asks them to choose some tracks, and before long a playlist of playlists is born, a musical elaboration of her romantic evolution.
There’s nothing left to do but sing them together: here is PLAYLIST PLAYLAST. The Impossible Karaoke, a collective performance to sing about an impossible love. The goal is to reclaim the music and erase the 17 playlists. Each track has a story behind it, and in a sort of stand-up comedy, Giani retraces the ‘playlist method’, the heartache, and the goodbyes.
PLAYLIST PLAYLAST. The Impossible Karaoke is an evening of singing and dancing, a collective ritual, shared laughter and tears. At the same time, it is a reflection on memory, on the archives – of songs, photos, messages – that we carry with us, in our phones or on hard drives, with the dilemma and sometimes the urgency to archive them, let them lie silent, or get rid of them.
After an initial private performance, this second edition is open to a wider audience. Participants will have the opportunity to suggest a track to add (and a story to tell). Among the proposals, two will be included as bonus tracks in the original playlist.
The performance is linked to the work Volatile, 2022. Click to watch.
Listen to the Playlist, click to open Spotify
“You were my first and only Spotify love“
a show by Gaia Giani, karaoke DJ Manga, with the participation of The Beat Barons, an idea developed in collaboration with Giulia Zorzi – Micamera
photo by Gaia Giani
GAIA GIANI BIO: click here
FOCUS #2 · TERRITORI / TERRITORIES
What a strange condition we are living in. The Earth demands our attention, the climate crisis asks us to finally take care of our planet, just when it seemed we could do without it. Some (very few super-rich), planning to move elsewhere, colonising other planets or transferring their residence onto space rockets orbiting far from here. Others (increasingly more), carving out their own enclosure, within boundaries more and more uncertain yet considered natural, traditional, inherited: we inside and the others outside. A great many (how many billions?) spending much of their time in digital spaces, according to codes and rules of a topological rather than metric nature. We all build exclusive territories, homes tailored to our needs, “particular housing solutions”, we might call them in the casual language of real estate agents. So, artificial territories, which do not exist in nature, our phantasmagorical projections. With one rather significant peculiarity though: to be inhabitable, these territories need resources extracted from the common territory that is the Earth: energy, food, labour, technology, metals, oxygen, water…
Forced to come to terms with the Earth, we escape it. We live by paradoxes: we inhabit the Earth, but struggle to set foot on the ground. We were all thrown onto the Earth, but we wonder how do I recognise my territory? We still measure distances in metres, but we are constantly connected, in networks that transcend them.
Someone, more informed, tells us that we are the Earth, that is, the Earth belongs to all its inhabitants, human and non-human. We should stop distinguishing between the world we rely on and the world we live in. The first is the Earth; the second is the territory. Those who concern themselves with the former are considered idealistic enemies of the people. Those who prioritize the latter tend to define it in demanding terms: Nation, Homeland. In order to live comfortably in “our” territory, we need the Earth. But if we adopt the perspective of the Earth, it follows that we must consider the territories we inhabit as non-exclusive, shared among other earthly beings. At that point, where to place the boundaries? If they cannot be recognised, territories disappear. Territorial pissing would return to being an exclusive practice of non-humans, with humans ceasing to seek refuge in it and ultimately recognising that territory is the use that is made of it: a space of circulation, available to those who move there.
For the thoughts expressed here, I am indebted to Pierluigi Crosta, Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, Alain Tarrius, and the Nirvana.
Claudio Calvaresi
[PhD in Urban Planning, he is Principal of Avanzi-Sustainability by Action. He is coordinator, for Avanzi, of MadreProject, the School of Bread and Places].
PROGRAM
8 + 9 e 15 + 16 June c/o Parco delle Groane
Caroline Barneaud, Stefan Kaegi (CH/GE)
22 + 23 June
ZONAK presents
BÜRGERBHÜNE
10 + 11 September
Be Flat (BE)
20 + 21 September
Moni Wespi (CH/BE)
11 + 12 October
Massimo Furlan, Claire De Ribaupierre (CH)
Photo by Alessandro Sala / Cesura – Design Neo Studio by Leonardo Mazzi
Moni Wespi (CH/BE)
participatory performance | duration 60 min
c/o Wanda Osiris Park, via Veglia, Milan
Moni Wespi continues the research, begun in 2014 with the project Moving Portraits, on the relationship between the human and the landscape, on our identities and the environment that surrounds us. This time the research focuses on children, on the movements they make when they play, on how they relate to and blend in with the environment.
Young performers, aged between 4 and 9 years, wear costumes made of specially produced fabrics that, thanks to their colours and textures, look like brick walls, stones or grass: their bodies camouflage themselves, becoming landscape, and their movements also adapt, slow down.
You can decide whether to just watch or actively participate in- wearing headphones and a costume, to simply reflect on your surroundings and your body. In this way, you too will arrive in your ‘landscape’, very slowly.
a project by Moni Wespi, with the group of children who responded to the public call
MONI WESPI is a international choreographer, art director and visual designer. In her choreographic practice, she creates images through radical scenographic choices, combined with her movement research. In 2007, Wespi founded the company LOUTOP, with which she created an entirely new and innovative stage project, that was touring internationally 2007-2014 (250 shows). In 2010 Monika Wespi was awarded the “GRANT” award of Zürich for her work with Loutop. In 2011 she joined the collective “Asphalt Piloten”, an artistic open cell and award-winning company of unbridled artists from different artistic and geographic backgrounds.
Since 2014 she enlargened her artistic career with international collaborations. The choregrapic visualart project MOVING PORTRAIT was born in a collaboration with the videoartist Lucia Gerhardt. Presented and exposed as videoinstallations. Since 2019 the Project starts taking performativ and interactive forms, where audience takes the place of the performer such as MOVING BLING and STEP IN SET. Moni Wespi is working from a multidisciplinary approach, elaborating visual concepts for performers, musicians, fashiondesigners and participates on the creation and definition of their visual language/identity, developing costumes/set design and support for videos, photographs and stage projects.