They look like two animal’s bodies that the sea has left on the shoreline, inexplicably elegant dressed , almost in a ceremonial manner, as in an afterparty, as in a hesitant landing.
The body in spite of the dress doesn’t know social rules, like a child who learns to walk, like an unspecified animal with feral eyes that feels uncomfortable and inadequate in human clothes. They get up, unable to speak, they study the space, they finally see each others , they copy themselves, they dance together and in a inexplicably way they understand each other. Together they construct gestural and behavioral codes, they look around and they let themselves be looked , in the attempt to leave a trace they abandon themselves and they imagine a shelter.
Is it possible to leave a piece of yourself and build a common trajectory by listening to each other? Do we still know how to inhabit the surrounding world, our body and the others’ bodies ?
Do we still know how to look?

Shelter was born in 2015, it’s our first authorial work. When four years later we found ourselves staging again the work, we initially thought of changing it in line with our artistic and personal evolution. By asking ourselves some questions, we found out the answer to our questions within the work itself, keeping it as it was originally. We asked ourselves when we stopped being brazen, when we started judging everything we do on stage, when we felt the need to justify all our choices and to find a meaning in everything we do.
Everything can be questioned, because it is true we have changed. However, change is taking place in us and it is reflected in a natural evolution of how we are inside the work. But this piece is still our refuge, and shelters are beautiful because inside they are not necessarily orderly, logic, fashionable and if they change they would no longer be the places we know and where we learnt how to return to.
This is Shelter for us.

Fabio Novembrini and Roberta Racis

by and with Fabio Novembrini and Roberta Racis
photo: Maria Cristina Valeri