Artist statement
Camilla Morello’s artistic research is characterized by the intersectionality of theatrical languages, dance, and performance, with links to video art, photography, and installation.
She has a BFA in acting from Scuola Nazionale di Cinema, in Rome, followed by a BA in Anthropology (La Sapienza University, Rome). Morello studied art, philosophy, and aesthetics (Université Paris 8), and specialized in dance in Olga Roriz’s biennial course, in Lisbon, where she served as Catarina Câmara’s assistant in her improv classes. She carried on training with several artists and choreographers, including Thomas Hauert, João Fiadeiro, Francisco Camacho, Vera Mantero, João Garcia Miguel, Danio Manfredini, Miguel Pereira, Sergi Fäustino and Mariana Tengner Barros. She has worked and collaborated with Tamara Cubas, Miguel Moreira, Miguel Pereira, Catarina Câmara, Lucía Nacht, Maurícia Neves, Dinarte Branco, Mickaël de Oliveira and Nuno M. Cardoso.
Morello’s experience with shared and collective artistic practices in the context of the Co-dance collective – which she founded with Sezen Tonguz, Daria Kaufman, Beatrice Cordier, Julia Salem, Ana Correa and Julia Salaroli – and her movement classes devised for social outreach projects led her to create her own works.
These experiences allowed her to substantiate the questions that matter to her, to hone her aesthetics, and weave her own poetic thread. She is interested in an art that is sensitive, committed, politically engaged, attuned to social change, to the human condition and its contradictions, and that questions the audience’s position. Her work is built upon theory and practice; upon symbolic and plastic composition of pictures, influenced by visual arts and cinema, and the pure engagement of her own body. In 2016, Morello premiered her first solo, A Danced Play – a semi-serious approach to emptiness, at the Black Box Theater – Belém Cultural Center (Lisbon). She created Common Land, a performance for unconventional spaces. In the meantime, she dedicated herself to photography, which prompted her to create the project Enclosures and a video work called Dissonances, which was on display at “Balleteatro Projections” (Coliseu do Porto Ageas).
Her last solo Urn, with which she was selected as artist-in-residence at the Linha de Fuga Festival (2018), was picked for Palcos Instáveis 2020 – Porto Municipal Theater, Campo Alegre; presented at the 2021 edition of MAPS (Festival of Performing Arts, Setúbal), and at the Cicle of Theater and Performing Arts Mimesis (Teatrão, Coimbra). Morello was also invited by the Cumplicidades Festival – Tandem Shaml Programme to collaborate with artists Inês Campos, Mohamed Abdelkarim and Mostafa El Barrody in the devising of the installation work Documenting Questions.
Through her work, Morello aims to contribute to a broader reflection on human consciousness, its development and re-evaluation, with the purpose of critiquing the growing dictatorship of the algorithm; to stimulate connective thinking that promotes empathy; to promote narratives that foster a debate about the urgency of creating an alternative to a life taken over by rationalization and mechanization; to think through the sacred dimension of subjectivity beyond identitarian movements.
In short, Morello is attempting to translate these reflections from their political context to the poetic realm of performing arts, with the purpose of creating a non-dualist sense of unity through her sensitivity.