The artistic-scientific project by Orsola Rignani, professor of Philosophy at the University of Parma and specialized in the themes of posthumanism, aims to propose a (inevitably cryptographic) cartography of the anthropological-existential valences of the prefix dis-, paying specific attention to the dimensions of dis-ambientation/dis-traction, dis-turbo/dis-continuity, dis-functionality/dis-ability, of dys-phoria/dis-obedience.
The international performing arts festival Natura Dèi Teatri has launched the Parentele project starting in 2022, based not on biological continuity but on the recognition of affinities and differences and the possibility of coexistence.
Parentele is researching new naturalcultural performance models, hybridizing philosophy, mythology, science and the arts, and in the next three-year period 2025_2027 it will be further divided into the following sections:
Permanences
Activations of relationships associated with the Lenz production project, with a view to legacy and transmission, to broaden the artistic geography of the Foundation.
Artist3 in dialogue for 2025: Beatrice Baruffini, Alessandro Conti, Lorenza Guerrini, Orsola Rignani
Temporary stops
Reception of female artists invited to produce projects of annual duration.
Sustained Artist for 2025: Muna Mussie.
Created by Rignani in collaboration with Lenz Fondazione, selected for the two-year period 2025/2026 among the winning paths of the Fape Call (University Fund for Public Engagement) of the University of Parma.
In an age marked by radical ecological, cultural, social, and technological discontinuities, the body becomes the primary place of impact and challenge. Bodies ravaged by war, disturbed by climate change, queer, disabled, reproduced or replaced by technology, anesthetized by algorithms: faced with these conditions, critical, community-based, and participatory reflection becomes urgent. The project aims to interrogate the body not as a simple tool to be used and discarded, but as a relational place of encounter, exchange, and construction of individual, collective, and trans-specific identities. Are bodies considered disabled alternative possibilities for relationships? Shouldn't the world rather misadapt to welcome them? Are animal and plant bodies passive resources or active interlocutors? Can the algorithm replace the body? What remains impossible without it?
Through cultural, artistic, theatrical, and performance languages, the project aims to raise awareness among citizens and students about the body's non-obviousness and non-neutrality, promoting its rediscovery as an inescapable dimension and a breeding ground for generative relationships on a cultural, social, trans-specific, and ecological level.
More info -> https://www.unipr.it/corpi-post-umani-202cinque-sei-sette-rappresentazioni-visioni-riflessionirifrazioni-narrazioni
Archimedes' lever is the insertion, between the dis and its subjects/objects, of a hyphen, that is, a trait-d'union, which, at the moment in which it marks the continuity between prefix and verb, highlights the scope of the prefix itself, consisting, in the case of the dis-, as can be read in dictionaries, in reversing the «good sense of the word to which it aims».
This reversal, however, does not reveal the affirmation of any negative meaning, but rather the (re)opening to the possible: dis-, for me, temporarily suspends/interrupts, simultaneously opening up fans of renewables/new combinations. Therefore, dis-setting, dis-turbing, dis-functioning, dis-obeying reveal themselves to be (exercises in) dismantling in favor of new possibilities of composition with a different vital breath.
In the movement, always provisional, of the dis- I see, in fact, (re)activating (provisionally) a universe, the pre-positional/pre-fixed one, alternative or better complementary to the nominative, noun and infinitive one in which the anthropocentric subject, the egoological self, has been placed, thought, developed and moved.
Between dis- and hyphen we are therefore profiling the emergency/urgency (of the recognition – active by virtue of its potential charge –) of an ontologically and ethically provisional, partial, precarious, relative, cracked, porous, disfigured, dismantled, tired (s)object. Whose original mono-chromy is worked and washed away by aquatic forces, is silenced, etched, cracked, stretch-marked, perforated, heated, burned, precariously unactivated, on crumpled and sideless canvases.
Dis-ambientamento, dis-trazione, dis-turbo, dis-continuità, dis-funzionalità, dis-abilità, dis-foria, dis-obbedienza...
È vero che dis- rovescia il «senso buono della parola a cui si prefigge»?
Il dis- sospende, interrompe temporaneamente, schiude ventagli di combinazioni nuove e rinnovate, smonta e rimonta sempre diversamente.
La mono-cromia originaria è lavorata e dilavata da forze acquatiche; è silenziata, incisa, incrinata, smagliata, scaldata, bruciata, precariamente dis-attivata, su tele sgualcite e senza lati… non senza dolore…
[...]
Cattivo demone? Crisi? Discontinuità radicale?
Il motore della discontinuità è il dis-: valore contrario, privativo (sottrattivo), reversativo, oppositivo…
Negazione, sottrazione, annullamento, deviazione.
Corridoio, zona di movimento e di cambiamento, di compensazione, di neutralizzazione, di sospensione, di trasformazione, di ri-possibilizzazione: dis-.
Cartografare il dis- è un crittografare, un codificare informazioni rendendole illeggibili a chi non possiede la chiave per decifrarle…
Nomi e verbi non hanno una tenuta soddisfacente di fronte all’esistenza...
Bisogna calare, con il dis-, i concetti in avvenimenti e in circostanze!
Il dis- dis-ambienta.
[...]
Le si sono slacciate le scarpe! Come farà a tenerle così tutta la mattina?
Perché il Crocefisso dell’Antelami ha le braccia tanto lunghe?
Costruiamo una casetta di legno sull’albero, così faremo delle fughe da fermi.
Come ti chiami? Eterotopia: le mie giornate sono lunghissime e i miei passi non coprono il prato.
Sei surrealista? No; ho mangiato la torta di pesche sciroppate. Poi vedremo…
I pomeriggi di agosto sono interminabili: che ne pensi di Proust?
Ma cosa ci sarà sotto quel rigonfiamento di terra? Il nostro tesoro?
Quante declinazioni ha il greco?
C’è qualcuno qui che s-ragiona!
[...]
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