within the Oltre le mura / Beyond the walls project

A nameless excitement charging the atmosphere, / a yearning, / sinking into the darkness of the tumultuous night, an intimacy between strangers, / and rotten teeth, Wojnarowicz who wants to commit suicide, the heroin hole / and once again we’re all under the shivering sun, / then the unexpected, something sudden / the glimmer of water, of the river, which makes us catch a glimpse, just for a moment / and there’s also the possibility of fear, / closing our eyes, becoming alone / and then finding ourselves in the wholeness of a crowd of bodies / that exhausting joy. Memory disorders, memory can only be disturbed – interferences, holes. Solitude, but plural: solitudes – a lot of empty space around a body. An aesthetic of collapse, the outdoor with no rules. Cruising.
We write about a utopia of bodies that we do not experience – that we do not have access to. A yearning to be many, a glimmering of possible futures.

D.W., in one of his works, sews together two pieces of stale bread, with a red thread. To make it whole again, impossible – the whole is missing. To stop life, delay death.
Or maybe we could just throw it all on nettles. Nettles are lucky. They have so many discarded ideas to feed on.

Silvia Calderoni is an actress and performer. She trained artistically from a very young age with choreographer Monica Francia and with the Teatro della Valdoca company, performing in several productions including Paesaggio con fratello rotto. Since 2006, she has been an active member of the Motus company and has performed in many shows including Rumore Rosa, A place, ICS – racconti crudeli della giovinezza, Crac, Let the sunshine in, Too-late, Iovadovia, Tre atti pubblici, Alexis. Una tragedia greca, nella tempesta, Caliban Cannibal, King Arthur, Tutto brucia, presented in numerous Italian and international festivals. She is the protagonist of The Plot is the Revolution alongside Judith Malina, historical founder of the Living Theatre. Since 2015 she has been on tour in the main international theatres and festivals with her solo MDLSX, for which she has collaborated on the dramaturgy together with Daniela Nicolò. In 2022 she will be on stage again with Valdoca with Enigma. Requiem for Pinocchio. Ubu Award 2009 as best actress under 30, she is Kaspar in La leggenda di Kaspar Hauser, a cult film directed by Davide Manuli (2012), and then in Last Words (2020) by Jonathan Nossiter with Nick Nolte, Kalipha Touray, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgard, Alba Rohrwacher, in the Romolus Sky series, directed by Matteo Rovere and in Non mi uccidere (2021) by Andrea De Sica.
She is an associate artist of the Queering Platform of the Kowloon Cultural District of Hong Kong.

Ilenia Caleo is a performer, activist and researcher. Since 2000 she has been working as an actress, performer and dramaturg in the contemporary scene, collaborating with various companies and directors, including Motus, Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, Davide Iodice. She is a philosopher by training, she completed a research doctorate in performance studies and political philosophy at the Università La Sapienza in Rome. Her research focuses on corporeality, feminist epistemologies, experimentation in the performing arts, new institutions and forms of cultural work. She is a researcher at the IUAV in Venice and coordinator of the Arts Module of the Studies and Gender Policies Master at the Roma Tre University, and collaborates with the research group of the five-year project “INCOMMON. In praise of community. Shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959-1979)”, ERC Starting Grant. She is the author of the volume Performance, materia, affetti. Una cartografia femminista, Bulzoni 2021 and co-edited In fiamme. La performance nello spazio delle lotte 1967/1979, b-r-u-n-o 2021.
She grew up politically and artistically in the scene of underground counter-cultures and social centers and is an activist of the Teatro Valle Occupato and in the movements of the commons and queer-feminists.

Calderoni-Caleo met in Motus’s Animale politico project in 2012 at the Teatro Valle Occupato in Rome. Together they participate in the Motus show nella tempesta and for some years they have been carrying out a common project of artistic residencies and research ateliers. Since 2018 they have been teaching at the IUAV in Venice in the Visual Arts Laboratory. Starting from the workshop of Biennale College Teatro 2018, they gave life to KISS, a performance project with 23 performers, produced by Santarcangelo Festival, CSS Udine, Motus. For the Hong Kong Queering Platform they jointly curate the nomadic project SO IT IS. In 2021 they were part of Flu 水o, a collective and cross-disciplinary project that won the Italian Council (9th Edition 2020). In addition to artistic projects, they actually share a bit of everything.

a project by: Silvia Calderoni / Ilenia Caleo
performance: Giacomo AG, Tony Allotta, Silvia Calderoni, Ilenia Caleo, Gabriele Lepera, Fede Morini, Ondina Quadri
care and production management: Elisa Bartolucci
dramaturgical advice: Anna Antonia Ferrante, and many friends
co-production: Azienda Speciale Palaexpo – Mattatoio | Progetto Prender-si Cura, Kampnagel (Hamburg), Kunstencentrum Vooruit vzw (Ghent), Motus Vague

in collaboration with Tenax Theatre Firenze

Oltre le mura / Beyond the walls is a project by Fondazione Fabbrica Europa aimed at activating some of the Florence peripheral contexts through performative actions at an international and local level that focus on the concepts of “body”, “sound”, “environment”,“community ”.

The project is part of

[photo: Rebecca Lena]