Artist statement
I’m a multidisciplinary artist, raised in Italy and currently based in Porto (Portugal).
I create in order to get knowing hidden layers of myself and the society I live in, I create to find alternatives to dominant voices, to the modus operandi supported by capitalist society. I hope that, by digging deep, whatever the question may be, we could reach a common territory of understanding.
In the past 16 years I’ve been developing a research that, on one side focuses on the relation between body and materials, creating highly visual performative works, on the other side led me to experiment different kinds of community involvement practices based on mutual share.
I believe that working, failing, and meeting people has been my best way of learning. I’ve never been interested in formulas and rigid technics. I’ve built my training trough academic, formal and informal education, always keeping alive the ability to create links and to flow through categories.
I hold a Master’s degree in performing arts and a post-graduate degree in Contemporary dance (ESMAE, Porto). I’ve studied contemporary dance at CEM (Lisbon) and CPDC (Florence), biomechanics with Nikolaj Karpov (from the GITIS academy, Mosca). In 2006 I co-founded the theatre company Zaches Teatro to work on the relation between visual theatre, dance and perfomance. With Zaches Teatro we investigated how to overcome the boundaries imposed by verbal language thanks to visual creations. In 2009 I moved to Portugal and started working with Madalena Victorino, Aldara Bizarro, André Braga e Cláudia Figueiredo. The collaboration with these choreographers and directors, made me experience different ways of working with community and with context inspired practices. From 2012, I’ve been directing transdisciplinary performances in collaboration with artists from different areas: Exposição (TMP, Porto, 2021), Fogo Lento (winner of Isabel Alves Costa Grant 2018), Album de Família, Tempo Rói, Santas de Roca, Salomé ha Perso il Lume (finalist of Premio Scenario). In 2021 I created with Sofia Arriscado “Lapso”, an experimental video that won the EDP/MAAT prize at the Fuso 2021 Festival.
Since 2019 I’m artistic director of Fogo Lento – cultural association. Our mission is to support and disseminate transdisciplinary research and creation, focusing on artistic practices based on a physical and sensory relationship with reality. We believe that “the adventure of being close to the things the world is made of” (Annie Albers, Black Mountain College), the relationship with body and materials, as well as the study of craft practices, which are at the origin of creative work, develop the capacity of analysis and reflection, creativity, and the ability to solve problems. The headquarters of the association is a space called CAMPO (Peripheral Centre of contamination between Art, Science and Environment), a farm in the periphery of V.N.Gaia, where artistic creation, education and agriculture contaminate each other. The location is a hybrid space, urban and rural at the same time, an urban field, surrounded by schools and people. A peripheral place routed in nowadays problem and contradiction, but, even those, capable of giving us every day, the experience of being close to the things the world is made of.
My artistic work is strongly contaminated by this physical and sensorial relation with reality, which is the engine for creations that see body and senses as a vehicle to understand our society.
To transcend material world, I build spaces, projections of internal states, with specifics rules and limits, defined by the questions that move me.
If by one side my work sometime has an intimist character, on the other side, I give a great importance to the path and process, which is characterized by different type of participatory practice, to keep alive the contact with community.