bottega hospites
Residence from 21 to 27 July 2025
C32 performing art work space - Forte Marghera, Mestre Venezia
O P E R A
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Artists participating in the residency: Leonardo Piana, Chiara Cecconello, Luca Gallio, Bea Brunetto.
bottega hospites is a multidisciplinary collective based between Padua and Venice, formed by young artists with performative practices between sound art, movement, stage writing and theory. The focus of its research is sound dramaturgy as a tool to listen and transform spaces and bodies, with a site-specific approach attentive to the geometries and dynamics of the places crossed. |
SYNOPSIS
Opera is a performance project for museums, theatres and unconventional spaces. Sensing an impending catastrophe, three performers and a sound designer invoke a utopian possibility of survival: a vocal archive of affections, especially marginal and queer ones. This archive takes the form of a contemporary opera, durational and not frontal. Electronic music and experimental vocals intertwine with baroque echoes and a body language balancing between emphasis and intimacy.
We are inspired by a real fact: in 1969, at the Museo Civico in Bassano del Grappa, a colossal horse by Antonio Canova was dissected and dismantled. It will be reassembled only in the coming years, after a long absence from the halls. The missing artwork symbolically leaves an empty space, which pushes us to question the artistic canon and the urgencies of the archive. Faced with the catastrophe, the potential disappearance of our affections, the concrete and canonized artwork fades into the background. The need becomes composing, decomposing and recomposing another work, that—immaterial and ephemeral—of our affectivity.
Archiving affections is a practice investigated by authors such as Liana Borghi and Ann Cvetkovich, to resist an often banal and daily catastrophe. According to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “container theory”, survival is always linked to the ability to collect and conserve. The performers of the work will therefore be workers, collectors of threatened affectivity. Dressed in work overalls, they will have chainsaws with them, a sign of a continuous negotiation between composition and decomposition, between archive and loss.
...the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary... ... it's hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as a statuary...
Frank O'Hara, Having a Coke with You
In opera, especially baroque opera, we glimpse a utopia: that of the arias, in which time stops to allow the expression of affections. The manneristic language of the librettos, which exposes and at the same time hides desire, reminds us of secret affective languages such as polari, spoken between the 19th and 20th centuries in the British queer community. Opera will play with these code jumps: words, gestures and sounds will put baroque expressiveness into dialogue with everyday intimacy, seeking a contamination of registers, a performative joy.
The dramaturgical thread will be the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, archetype of the loss of an affection. In baroque operas, as well as in Monique Wittig’s feminist rewriting, Orpheus’ voice subtracts Eurydice from death. Singing about affections means making them last, even beyond the end of the world. For this reason, the performance will last a long time (3-4 hours): the passage of time will act on the bodies and subtly transform the space. The audience will be able to enter, exit, move around and distract themselves. Opera thus imagines infiltrating different places: museums, theatres, cloisters, warehouses — basically any space in which an ephemeral occupation, a squat, a fire is possible.
Opera is a performance project for museums, theatres and unconventional spaces. Sensing an impending catastrophe, three performers and a sound designer invoke a utopian possibility of survival: a vocal archive of affections, especially marginal and queer ones. This archive takes the form of a contemporary opera, durational and not frontal. Electronic music and experimental vocals intertwine with baroque echoes and a body language balancing between emphasis and intimacy.
We are inspired by a real fact: in 1969, at the Museo Civico in Bassano del Grappa, a colossal horse by Antonio Canova was dissected and dismantled. It will be reassembled only in the coming years, after a long absence from the halls. The missing artwork symbolically leaves an empty space, which pushes us to question the artistic canon and the urgencies of the archive. Faced with the catastrophe, the potential disappearance of our affections, the concrete and canonized artwork fades into the background. The need becomes composing, decomposing and recomposing another work, that—immaterial and ephemeral—of our affectivity.
Archiving affections is a practice investigated by authors such as Liana Borghi and Ann Cvetkovich, to resist an often banal and daily catastrophe. According to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “container theory”, survival is always linked to the ability to collect and conserve. The performers of the work will therefore be workers, collectors of threatened affectivity. Dressed in work overalls, they will have chainsaws with them, a sign of a continuous negotiation between composition and decomposition, between archive and loss.
...the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary... ... it's hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as a statuary...
Frank O'Hara, Having a Coke with You
In opera, especially baroque opera, we glimpse a utopia: that of the arias, in which time stops to allow the expression of affections. The manneristic language of the librettos, which exposes and at the same time hides desire, reminds us of secret affective languages such as polari, spoken between the 19th and 20th centuries in the British queer community. Opera will play with these code jumps: words, gestures and sounds will put baroque expressiveness into dialogue with everyday intimacy, seeking a contamination of registers, a performative joy.
The dramaturgical thread will be the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, archetype of the loss of an affection. In baroque operas, as well as in Monique Wittig’s feminist rewriting, Orpheus’ voice subtracts Eurydice from death. Singing about affections means making them last, even beyond the end of the world. For this reason, the performance will last a long time (3-4 hours): the passage of time will act on the bodies and subtly transform the space. The audience will be able to enter, exit, move around and distract themselves. Opera thus imagines infiltrating different places: museums, theatres, cloisters, warehouses — basically any space in which an ephemeral occupation, a squat, a fire is possible.
Fotos by Marina Carluccio
