re-creatures: a new movement of artistic appearances

The spaces of La Pelanda—Mattatoio di Roma are opening up to the public with a new movement of artistic appearances of re-creatures. Installations and moments of performance curated by Ilaria Mancia, breathe life into the spaces in synergy with the other training, education, research and production activities hosted at the Mattatoio. 

re-creatures is a call for the public sharing of a multifaceted network of proposals associated with the various languages of the performance arts, in the belief that artistic research and discursive and critical practices are the most effective tools for overcoming identity-related closure, for sparking a dialogue (even among different species), for avoiding escalating conflicts, and for processing the lunacy of mankind’s urge to destroy. Today more than ever before.  

The public openings are accompanied by other projects curated by Ilaria Mancia hosted in the La Pelanda spaces: the artistic research and production residency programme entitled Prender-si cura 2022, now in its third edition, the Annual Master’s Degree in the Performance Arts MAP_PA and Ricreazione’s free workshops.

These projects, following the calling to create a center dedicated to the different languages of performing arts, investigate and expand the concept of “performance,” involving artists whose research is among the most interesting on the national and international scene. 

The artistic research and production residency programme Prender-si cura was devised to support the moment of research and experimentation that is crucial for every artistic creation, and to coordinate it in its various aspects, ranging from organisation to reflection and to “care.”

The project—asking questions regarding the very concept of artistic residency and seeking to expand its modalities and possibilities—involves and produces the work of a group of artists invited to develop their research, stretching from dance to theatrical performance, visual art, music and video. Some of the work produced has already been presented at major national and international institutions. 

The Master’s Degree in the Performance Arts MAP_PA, organised by the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, sets out to offer a formative pathway which, through the exploration of the performance languages of theatre, music, dance and the visual arts, can guide participants towards hitherto untried forms of artistic design and experimentation and of interdisciplinary research, bringing in artists of international renown as teacher-curators.

And lastly, Ricreazione is a cycle of free workshops open to the public, devised as an open, formative opportunity allowing participants to get back into the idea of inhabiting a shared space. Aiming to deepen contemporary artistic language through the practices of movement, sound and drawing, the workshop cycle sets out to pursue the exploration of the performance arts as a terrain for exchange and experimentation. Ricreazione comprises two proposals, mappa mondi, art workshops involving movement, music and drawing for children, and traiettorie, designed for adult participants seeking to explore, discover and address the guest artists’ various practices and techniques, their various paths intersecting in an open space of dialogue and research.

Many of the artists hosted in the re-creatures schedule take part in the Mattatoio’s formative and research projects, either with the idea of eliminating disciplinary barriers and boundaries or because they wish to implement a productive ecology linking the various projects active in the spaces and involving, in different ways, the artistic presences that pass through them with their practices. MP5’s work with Alessandro Sciarroni and Muna Mussie’s work first saw the light of day as part of the Prender-si cura residency project; Simone Aughterlony, Alessandro Sciarroni, Riccardo Benassi are lecturers in the MAP_PA Master’s Degree; and Motus, Marco Torrice and Industria Indipendente are part of the Ricreazione workshop cycle.

re-creatures will continue over the summer in an attempt to create an environment in which bodies, through simply being, turn their presence into an “intense becoming,” ritualising the fact of being together, causing spatial, immersive and sensory resonances to emerge in the need to tune in to listening in a dimension of collective and public experimentation.