Call for applications: workshop and 6 residency grants at UNIDEE and Fondazione Zegna

UNIDEE, Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto and Fondazione Zegna welcome your application to participate in Rituals of the contemporary, a residential module conceived by Fiamma Montezemolo.

This module aims to reflect on the notion of the ritual, its current meaning and practice. In the last years many disciplines (religion studies, anthropology, philosophy, art, socio-biology) have approached the ritualistic and its role in making “visible” a certain order in a specific context, in showing “the proven way of doing something” which is the etymology of the word. As Catherine Bell says, ritualization is “a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities.”

The ritual involves, in general, a series of choreographed practices based on images, words, activities, objects, symbols that are organized in a performative act. The ritualistic act requires whomever is involved to cross three phases: separation / threshold / aggregation (V. Turner). The initiated is pushed to “plunge” in a sort of liminal phase in which he/she is immersed in an anti-structure/chaos (changing clothes, food, hallucination, dwelling in unusual spaces, loss of usual cultural references, etc.) for a definite period of time and in a specific space in order to re-emerge to a renewed status and way to influence the cosmos.

The participants will be invited to reflect on the ritual and envision their own performative act. They will do so by recreating a “rite of passage,” or “seasonal rite,” or “life event rite,” or “rite of exchange” of their own choosing, through an investigation of the ritual in art, focusing the module on contemporary socio-cultural rites in the territory of Trivero and Oasi Zegna. In classic anthropology, the main understanding of the ritual is that the ‘liminal phase’ brings ultimately to an act of reintegration in a certain societal group. In contrast, our main question will be: could an art work make the liminal a more permanent condition and bring us to a new order instead of a preestablished one? We will work on the association of performance and ritual stressing their processual, indefinite dimension, and transformative possibilities, thus making the threshold of the liminal the main source of our creative acts.

The 6 residency grants include:
–Participation to the residential module Rituals of the contemporary mentored by Fiamma Montezemolo
–Full board
–Accommodation (single room, shared bathroom facilities—for 8 nights)
–Medical Insurance (accidents only)
–Use of a shared studio space and workshop facilities

All costs for travels and Visa are intended at the sole expenses of the selected participants.

Read more. Download the application form.

For further informations and applications, please visit UNIDEE’s website or please contact: unidee [​at​] cittadellarte.it.

Partners
UNIDEE patrons are Piedmont Region, Compagnia di San Paolo, CRT Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Torino, Fondazione Zegna, illycaffè S.p.A. / UNIDEE AIR partners are A.M. Qattan Foundation (PS); Yarat Contemporary Art Space (AZ).