Nomadic School

content

Since its beginning, Little Fun Palace has left behind the representational distance cultivated by art institutions. Guests and audiences have mingled in a flawless strip of events designed for different surroundings and contents. I always believed that this openness, this capacity to welcome uncertainty from a manifold of micro-ecologies of different guests, could lead the Caravan to an expansion of the discipline of theatre-making. And yet, its ever-changing agenda didn’t allow experimenting a specific knowledge-process entailed into the Caravan itself, in the particular space that Little Fun Palace is and represents. We have never reached a scientific rigour necessary to establish the Caravan as a nomadic school.

To fulfil this gap, the caravan becomes a platform resonating OHT’s research on theatre and set-designing in relation to natural and urban spaces. A discourse that does not ignore the place where it occurs; a Caravan designed as a flexible framework where different spaces can be plugged in. As suggested by architect Cedric Price, Little Fun Palace has its ultimate goal in the possibility of change at the behest of its users and content. Consequently, the nomadic school will re-think the shape of the Caravan every time a public programme will be hosted. Specific designed components will immerge Little Fun Palace in its surroundings. By designing and building further features of Little Fun Palace, we will deepen its position into society, its position in the world, its geographical position. The Caravan will be simultaneously a study of the world as well as a part of it echoing Cedric Price’s educational ideas of making flexible architecture to have an actual impact on our world. A Caravan denying hierarchical transmission of knowledge to connect set-design and theatre to real life and avoiding separations between moments of learning, of fun, of encounter, of collectiveness and moments of individuality

On a theoretical level, the project moves its first step from Gertrude Stein’s idea of “a play as a landscape” and how her ideas might resonate outside the stage. In the research, set-design and architecture are active ingredients of the theoretical discourse as well as on a practical level via the Caravan position in public space. A space that to be defined as public is meant to be agonistic, heterogeneous rather than homogenous, where different people, ideas and words live together. In this regard there’s a neglected theatre tradition that prompted landscape not simply as a backdrop or scenery but as detonator of feelings. Authors like Anton Cechov, Maurice Maeterlink, Samuel Beckett, Henrik Ibsen or Heiner Müller made use of landscape as a theoretical tool to overstep the limits of antropochene, psychologism and logo-centrism.

A further comparison with ideas taken from other field of research might be crucial to expand the perception of theatre. One example is the definition of unintentional design applied to landscapes by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: “that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and not human. The design is clear in the landscape’s ecosystem. But none of the agents have planned this effect. Humans join other in making landscapes of unintentional design”. In climate activism, landscapes are less and less backdrop of human activities. They are active, living beings together with humans. Landscapes are the quintessence of the world understood as space where life is shared with others. They are references for down scaling human beings within the ecosystem and this process might be applied to theatre as well; a democratisation of the stage where set-design and scenography are not just backdrops of the drama but active part of it. The current aesthetic regime embodied on stage is still enormously linked to actors and actresses as centre of the action and of the plot. However, an ecological turn is possible also in theatre-making and democratising all the elements involved into the artistic process might also be a metaphor for opening up theatre to different perspectives decentralising human hubris. The initial construction workshop of the Nomadic School becomes an opportunity to produce a space where people can connect and talk. In a gradual way the workshop adapts a place to the caravan and vice versa, materialises reality by creating an ecosystem previously absent. An attempt to give space to the thoughts and words to come. The workshop becomes the time of materialisation, where reality materialises through a collective gesture of participants and future guests.

Furthermore, if landscape represents the possibility to connect all the parts, it also represents the impossibility to be isolated. This is why Little Fun Palace is not meant to be just a single person research but an experiment where individuality joins collective moments. A time together where the Caravan turns into a nomadic school. A school inspired by spatial researchers like Josef Albers at the Black Mountain College where life and studies couldn’t be separated. These collective moments reveals a research methodology that continuously invents its own model. The Caravan will change shape via workshops with students that will literally modify it by designing new features necessary for the cultural programme of the Caravan itself, and for its position within a specific surroundings.

Creating a nomadic community in different environments is fundamental to embrace the concept of mutability and to underline the importance of a space that does not belong only to us. Once the location has been chosen and the caravan has been prepared for that specific environment, the nomadic school will take place for a limited period of time. Each programme will be a series of talks, screening, encounters, tiny performances, dj-sets and so on. All these micro-ecologies will compose a dialogical Caravan, a multitude of voices from guests to audiences without dogmatic structures that together will think of theatre, set-design and climate crisis as an aesthetic territory that has political implications without using a political language.

To conclude, creating a nomadic school around Little Fun Palace will not deliver a final or conclusive model about theatre as public space, nor a clear methodology about how to think performance design and scenography within a semi-public space as theatre. The project aims to be a performative Caravan reflecting on itself and -at the same time- on different artistic practices. Existing in the endless exchange between the environments, the guests and the students gravitating around the Caravan. To a certain extend, embracing the uncertainty of gathering different points of view, of creating an heterogeneous community, is what will make the production of knowledge tangible for all the participants.

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year

2024

participants

Giulia Odetto
Michael Bekele
Maria Isidora Vincentelli
Johanna Gratzer
Flavia Prestininzi
Gianni Laneri
Andy Peruccon
Marlene Aigner
May Abnet
Inès Panizzi
Beatrice Citterio
Prathima Muniyappa

mentors

Stina Fors (performance artist, drummer and vocalist)
Her howls are not bare words; they are fused with spits and fluids, a certain wetness. She is a one-woman-punk-band and performs regularly at night clubs and underground music clubs. Graduated at SNDO Amsterdam in 2019, she’s also selected for the danceWEB scholarship at ImPulsTanz in Vienna. Since then, she works as author and performer with other artists such as Kate McIntosh, OHT and many more.

Industria Indipendente (Martina Ruggeri, Erika Z. Galli)
Their artistic process crosses different languages and practices, in an endless search for affinity, epidermal sensitivity and glance. Their works focus on articulating issues like the relationship between human beings and nature, the dimension of "unproductive" time and the construction of alternative and fictional worlds in which to build communities and alliances.

Rosario Talevi (architect and curator)
Rosario Talevi is a Buenos Aires born, Berlin-based architect, curator, editor and educator interested in critical spatial practice, transformative pedagogies and feminist futures. Since 2014, Rosario’s interdisciplinary practice has manifested through the work of diverse groups such as Floating University (since 2018), Soft Agency (2017-2023), raumlabor berlin (2016-2021). She has been teaching and researching architecture and design in Berlin (UdK, TUB), Hamburg (HFBK), Bolzano (Unibz) and Buenos Aires (UBA). In 2022, Rosario was a fellow at the Thomas Mann Haus in Los Angeles, California. Single mother of Florentina Talevi (born 2003).

Filippo Andreatta (artist and curator)
Filippo Andreatta graduated in Architecture at Politecnico di Milano (BA) and in Visual and Performing Arts at IUAV University in Venice. He has founded OHT and brings to the stage Delirious New York, the cult book of contemporary architecture by architect Rem Koolhaas. From 2015 to 2020 he is co-curator of the international festival of Performance and Performing Arts at Centrale Fies.

Sarah Messerschmidt (researcher - ex Nomadic)
Sara Messerschmidt is a writer interested in art, literatures, and critical theory. Her work spans poetic prose and academic essay, through which she explores intertextual and interdisciplinary responses to film and moving image. She has been an affiliated writer with the Maumaus School in Lisbon (2021) and she was a Writer in Residence supported by the Kunstverein München(2022). Her recent publications can be found in Another Gaze, Artforum and others.

Giacomo Lorandi (gastronomic researcher and cook)
Giacomo Lorandi is a cook and a trainer in the fermentation field. Graduated in Economics from the University of Turin, he trained as a sommelier and fermenter and then he attended the Master Food and Society at the Bicocca University in Milan, to study food not only as a product but as an ecosystem of people, knowledge and places. His cuisine reflects his ethics: respect for the raw material and for those who produced it, seasonality and reduction of waste.

Lilian Fraiji (curator and activist)
Lilian Fraiji is an activist, curator and producer based in the Amazon, Brazil. She is the Co-Founder of Labverde, a platform dedicated to the development of multidisciplinary content involving Art, Science, Traditional Knowledge and Ecology. She has curated several art exhibitions involving the subject of climate crisis and nowadays she is collaborating with the Forest Project (Invisible Flock-UK), the Art and Environment Program of University of Arts London.

Lucia Pietroiusti (curator)
Lucia Pietroiusti is curator, programmer and strategist. She is Head of Ecologies at Serpentine, London, where she founded the General Ecology project. Working at the intersection of art, ecology and systems, she is the curator of the opera-performance Sun & Sea; and the co-editor of More-than-Human (2020).

smach (Michael Moling / Stefano Riba)SMACH stands for San Martino Constellation of Art, Culture and History. The project aims to enhance the cultural and landscape heritage of San Martino and Val Badia. It has been doing so, since 2012, with the Biennial, which has so far involved more than 60 artists, from several countries, in an osmotic exchange with the territory activated by site-specific works. From 2018, SMACH's mission also resides in Val dl'Ert, a public art park in nature, created in an abandoned valley in San Martino. The cornerstones of both projects are free access and a focus on rediscovering cultural and natural resources. SMACH also organizes concerts, performances, screenings, guided tours and educational workshops.

Michael Scerbo (performance maker - ex Nomadic)
Michael Scerbo is a performance maker, curator and creative producer. His current artistic research at the intersection of cognitive aesthetics, new technologies, politics and infrastructural critique explores the relationship between matter/form and knowledge production from an embodied and sensuous perspective. He expands his artistic practice by collaborating with various artists, among which Tino Sehgal, Michele Rizzo, and Samira Elagoz, while working alongside various institutions supporting their creative endeavours and developments.

Job Rietvelt (creative producer)
Job Rietvelt is a creative producer and program maker. His work is driven by a constant search for connection, solidarity, and experimentation. He is connected to the work of Abhishek Thapar(India/Netherlands) and he was responsible for the internationalisation of Theaterfestival Boulevard (NL). Endeavouring to weave the threads between artistic and business dimensions of creative producing, Job collaborates with artists, collectives and institutions (DansateliersRotterdam, Amsterdam Dance Event, Tanzfabrik Berlin) from Europe and beyond.

Prinoth Herwig (palaeontologist, Museum Ladin)
is a palaeontologist specialising in the archaeology of the Dolomites. He was a scientific co-worker at the Museum Ladin and then curator of palaeozoology at the Natural Science Museum of South Tyrol until 2023. Currently, he is part of the team at the Museum Ladin. He has contributed to important archaeological discoveries and conducted palaeontological research into the late Permian extinctions. Prinoth is also involved in outreach to make palaeontology accessible to all.