ARCIPELAGO

Arcipelago is a choreographic long-term project based on actions built to be experienced in non–theatrical spaces.

Arcipelago's performances happen in places defined and experienced as abodes, parlors, shelters, and not necessarily homes.

Arcipelago Booklet

Due

The collaboration with Glauco Salvo, musician and sound artist, is focused on the interaction between space, sound, and movement, in an open format performance adaptable to theatre spaces and non-conventional places. Space's characteristics themself are the starting point for the performance, where dancer and musician use improvisation as the main tool to activate perception and imagination, and to turn the space into a temporary unreal place to inhabit with their practice.

The performance is realized with portable audio devices, it doesn't require electricity and can be adapted to any kind of space.

Concept Annamaria Ajmone, Glauco Salvo.
Parco di Levante (Cesenatico), 08. 09. 2022 – Elementi, curated by MU and MAGMA

A t t i k a

A t t i k a is an infinite, open, and nomadic project moved by a mutual interest in interpretative practices about landscapes, their both explicit and implicit nature, and their performativity. The encounter with Industria indipendente is a first step towards the creation of a space in revolt, taking care of specific cities' places. This is a chance to move gazes and time in the favor of a fertile realm where it is still possible to imagine possible futures, places where desires and existences can breathe.

A project by Annamaria Ajmone and Industria Indipendente (Martina Ruggeri & Erika Z. Galli). With Annamaria Ajmone, Acchiappashpirt, Erika Z. Galli, La Pineta, Marco D'Agostin, Emanuela Villagrossi, Front De Cadeaux, Industria Indipendente, Maria Giovanna Cicciari, Le Spiagge bianche (Lillatro), Nastro, Villa “La Scogliera”, Palm Wine, Valerio Sirnå, Steve Pepe, Benoise, Roberta Zanardo. Production Cab 008 with the support of Centro di Residenza della Toscana (Armunia and CapoTrave / Kilowatt), Regione Toscana, MiBACT and Comune di Firenze.

Photo © Antonio Ficai

SLIDE IN B

Slide in B is a durational performance based on inhabiting a specific space for many hours, transforming it into an intimate – yet never private – place. Performed at Palazzo Durini (Milan), Slide in B is a mixture of different elements. The environment itself, its volumes, walls, accesses, decorations; Annamaria Ajmone's own will, aimed at living and transforming the space through research and the experience of movement. The third element is the contribution by Caned Icoda who, starting from the idea of combining space and sound, developed a costume and a sound for both the place and the dance. The sound system itself becomes a decorative element, visible and crucial to the dynamics of the performance. The sounds have been recorded live and directly from the collection of Fondazione Bonotto: Concrete Poetry and Fluxus recordings, a vast and multidisciplinary archive. The fourth and crucial element is the audience, free to stand, cross, to go back and forth, to choose a specific corner and decide how long remain inside.

Concept and dance by Annamaria Ajmone. Costumes and live audio Caned Icoda. Organized by Danae Festival in collaboration with Fondazione Bonotto. Production Cab 008 with the support of Regione Toscana and MiBACT.

Video © Maria Giovanna Cicciari

Photo © Michela di Savino

De La

For this durational performance, set within the current exhibitions, Annamaria Ajmone will perform, in improvisation, to the soundtrack without images, of "La Région Centrale", the 1971 work by Canadian filmmaker Michael Snow. "La Région Centrale" was set up as an experiment in filmmaking and shot with endurance, over 24 hours, with a custom-made robotic arm holding the camera as it scanned a landscape void of human bodies. Through her precise, strange and contorted movements, Annamaria Ajmone articulates the grotesque human-ness of her body. De La, is a performance that ushers the performer and her public across the space of the gallery, through rooms, under doorways, against walls, subverting the traditional viewing experience and treating the whole gallery as a stage. By responding to her environment, making eye contact and taking moments of intentional and uncomfortable pause, Ajmone reverses the role of viewer and performer, she reads her public while being read. “Viewers” are invited to come and go for the duration of the performance. (Text by Lauren Mackler).

Concept Annamaria Ajmone. Artistic consultancy Simone Bertuzzi and Lauren Mackler. Costumes Caned Icoda. Organized and curated by Night Gallery and Public Fiction.

Video © Night Gallery

Antala

With Antala, the first floor of the Musei Civici of Reggio Emilia becomes a meeting-space and meeting-time in which outlines, limits, and borders are interchanged. The body displays itself, becomes and constantly mutates. The articulation of movement happens directly on the set, constructing a discourse, which trough the power of suggestion re-elaborates, transforms and amplifies spaces that are internal and external to itself. To realistically describe a fantastical dimension is perhaps the only way to truly talk about the world. Humans feel an innate and instinctive tension towards all things elusive and multifaceted. But this tension is forced to give in when confronted with the untiring changing of the elements. The costume is made of pictures taken from ancient bestiaries and herbal books and printed on fabric. Don't Dj's ep, "Authentic Exoticism", is reproduced in its entirety in the Marble Hall.

Concept Annamaria Ajmone. Costumes Lucia Gallone. Music consultancy Simone Bertuzzi. Organized and curated Giulia Basaglia. Production Cab 008 and co-production Fondazione I Teatri di Reggio Emilia, Musei Civici di Reggio Emilia with the support of Regione Toscana and MiBACT.

Photo © Alfredo Anceschi

First illustration by David Kandel from Hieronymus Bock, “Kreutterbuch” (1580)

Last drawing from Leo Lionni, "Botany of the Elsewhere" (1976)

Solo

Created for the Fondazione Prada's Cinema in Milan, in the context of Virgilio Sieni's choreography project "L'Atlante del Gesto" (The Atlas of Gesture), Solo has been conceived as a single choreographic action that unfolds across the rooms of the cinema, lasting one hour and ten minutes. The sound environment is entirely constituted by the original soundtrack of Michael Snow's 1971 movie "La Région Centrale". Considered as one of the most important structural cinema pieces, the movie features a Canadian landscape and adopts every possible camera movement, for 180 minutes. In Solo, images have been removed leaving the nude musical score made of electronic and synthetic sounds. The performer intends to continuously modify and alter space and time coordinates in order to amplify, narrow down and expand them. The audience freely moves around the venue and shares the space with the performer as an active part of space's geometry.

Concept Annamaria Ajmone. Artistic consultancy Simone Bertuzzi. Organized and curated by Giulia Basaglia. Sound environment Michael Snow, “La Région Centrale”.

Photo © Ela Bialkowska

Still from Micheal Snow, "La Région Centrale"

Video © Andrea Cavallari

Büan

In old German, Büan means “to live” and became Bauen, “to build”, in modern German. An abode is certainly a place of stay and a shelter but not necessarily a house: it can be a temporary dwelling, a place where to stop, or in the case of the Gondolas of the Squero, a place for repairs and restoring. Within the area of the Squero of San Trovaso, Büan develops practices of temporary inhabitance where the dancer immerses herself as if she were an integral part of it. Passages, roads, and routes are traced, discovering an allure that would otherwise be difficult to foresee. All of this in a continuous reference between the outside, which is nowadays fast and continuously changing, and the inside, which is indeed a dwelling for echoes and memories that are ancestral. Büan has been created after the Virgilio Sieni's invitation to participate in the Biennale College Danza 2015.

Concept Annamaria Ajmone. Music consultancy Federica Zamboni. Organized and curated by Giulia Basaglia. Production Venice Biennale 2015.

Photo © Akiko Miyake; © Alberto Calcinai

Radura

Radura is a video that documents and gathers all the improvisations sessions shot by Maria Giovanna Cicciari with Annamaria Ajmone in chronological order from 2012 to 2015. It is based on a working method that considers both who shoots and who is shot as creating a performance. The long shot allows to capture a dance improvisation in all its complexity and to organically create an internal composition of the images. The results is a stream of images that comes from an internal body archive. The camera becomes a tool for documenting time and space but also a protagonist, an actor involved in the action. The video documents also exploring different natural sites like woods or metropolitan green areas and then trying to reenact that impro in the classic rehearsal studio. The very few editing cuts in Radura stress this specific concept of coming and going from outwards inwards, going from a free-flow improvisation to a more structured way of moving.

Concept Annamaria Ajmone, Maria Giovanna Cicciari. Video directed by Maria Giovanna Cicciari. HD and S8 transferred to HD, 57' (in loop).

Stills © Maria Giovanna Cicciari

Innesti

Innesti is one of the first steps through Arcipelago project, as an investigation on the relationship between space and movement. Within a constant exchange of distancing, space is analyzed as a physical structure rather than its cultural dimension. The body is eventually an element inside the room, as a sum of geometries and rhythm produced. Performed at the Institut Culturel Italien in Paris in 2015, Innesti relives as traces on the video created by Sara Bonaventura: "As a director, I tried not to get out of the subject of the choreography, ... I edited these fragments of the past, thinking of what is lost of performative nowness. I interpolated this documentation with other takes filmed in less evocative and anonymous places in Paris, mostly the Petit Ceinture, an abandoned railway that once surrounded the city, as a metaphor of a closed time based and site-specific action, that might remain open in a different signifier, in the cinema elsewhere."

Concept Annamaria Ajmone. Music consultancy Simone Bertuzzi. Organized and curated by Giulia Basaglia. In collaboration with Mosaico Danza / Interplay Festival. Video directed by Sara Bonaventura. HD, color, 16/9, 19′ 59”.

Photo © Marina Mers

Still and video © Sara Bonaventura