CONSTELLATIONS OF CRITICAL BODIES Summer Class 2025

OPEN CALL FOR ARTISTS

An opportunity to immerse yourself in performance art and collaboration to implement your performance practice for ten days under the guidance of five artists of the Anam Cara Collective.

Applications are now accepted on a rolling basis until March 30, 2025 (but spaces are limited and expected to fill quickly).

 

As part of the Venice International Performance Art Week Educational Learning Programme, we present the sixth in a series of practical workshops on performance art in Venice:

 

CONSTELLATIONS OF CRITICAL BODIES

10-day Intensive Joint Summer Class on the Practice of Performance Art

With VestAndPage, Andrigo & Aliprandi and Sara Simeoni

June 17-27, 2025

C32 performing art work space, Forte Marghera, Venice, Italy

With a final public presentation on Thursday, June 26, 2025

 

⚡️ For this workshop, we seek up to 16 international performance artists, radical actors, movers, sound artists, and poets interested in performance practices centred on the body.

⚡️ This includes individuals of all experience levels and abilities who wish to challenge their performance practices further and collaborate with other international artists.

⚡️ You will work under the co-mentorship of experienced facilitators, employing comprehensive methodologies.

⚡️ We aim to give you the time, space, and tools to refine your practice, draw inspiration from collaborations, and forge new connections.

 

The intensive summer class takes place on campus at C32, a performing arts workspace in the heart of Forte Marghera historic park, which overlooks the western bank of the Venice lagoon. The final workshop will be publicly shared on Thursday, 26 June. The collaborative laboratory process focuses on methods and techniques derived from artistic practices that emphasise bodies, spaces, and the art of encounters:

⚡️ VestAndPage (Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes) utilise performance art and film to create ephemeral and immaterial works that embody ecological, philosophical, and queer feminist thought. They engage with the ritualistic, liminal aspects of performance art and collective imaginings, adopting a poetic, political, embodied, and phenomenological approach to vulnerability and risk as intrinsic qualities of human existence. They share their methodology as lecturers and mentors in performance art at universities and communities worldwide.

⚡️ Andrigo & Aliprandi (Marianna Andrigo and Aldo Aliprandi) combine dance, performance art, sound motion, philosophy, video, installations, and site-specific performances, often characterised by their complete verticality and the resulting shiver it induces. Their poetics centre on detail, silence, and the entropic dynamics evoked by emotions and perception. They share experiences through tangible, physical practices in which the body navigates various conditions to confront and challenge non-ordinary situations while expanding individual potential in listening and absorbing the external.

⚡️ Sara Simeoni is a dancer, choreographer, performer, and certified Danceability teacher. As a long-standing member of the Carolyn Carlson Company, she has toured the world alongside renowned choreographers and artists. She has taught at dance academies internationally. The principles of weight, gravity, fall, and recovery energise the body and perception, fostering fluidity and presence, endurance and awareness, attention to detail, and movement accuracy, to let thought and emotion converge: performance emerges intuitively, imaginatively, and viscerally.

 

⚡️Tuition fee: 750.-€

⚡️Optional additions (limited availability): Shared rooms in the Forte Marghera hostel +20.–€/night

⚡️Arrival: June 16, Departure: June 28

⚡️We offer two grants of a 50% reduction in tuition fees to persons from countries with limited funding support. Please describe your situation in the relevant field in the application.

 

Applications are now accepted on a rolling basis until March 30, 2025, through the written form or as a video. With your application, you provide extensive information about your artistic background and current urgency and show a solid commitment to the immersive, collaborative 10-day artistic process.

The VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment. The workshop venue is only partially accessible. Don't hesitate to contact us with any questions about accommodating your needs: info@mariannaandrigo.it, verena@vest-and-page.de.
 

 

This is for those who trust in change.

It is for the overstretched global bodies searching for a home or on pilgrimage.

For those to whom the surreal is familiar, those who dance on the limits hand in hand.

For those who go to spaces of hidden beauty and scan into the flesh of dream matter —

visionary poets, artists and people pushed by an urgency.

For those who reconcile with the mystery to let things coexist.

For those who listen, who seek to express, not to impress.

For those who take risks in the name of seeking new images.

For those journeyed through visible and invisible places,

real and imaginary places.

A nomadism aiming to empower one's art and openness,

leaving subtle traces, structuring temporary autonomous zones.

Taking action because each one of us has important stories to tell,

moving through generative inquiry and collective imaginings.

And again, "Remember all, forget all."