No. 10Miscellanea III

Editoriale del N. 10 di Connessioni Remote. Artivismo_Teatro_Tecnologia

This paper examines MyceliuMinds, an artistic project conceived by Matteo Domenichetti and curated by Milovan Farronato, as a case of digital artivism aimed at questioning the forms of sociality and power that structure the algorithmic ecosystem of social media platforms. Presented in 2022 at the Casa degli Artisti in Milan, the project unfolds through a video trilogy and a participatory performance - the Swinging Club - in which users exchange their Instagram profiles to experiment with new forms of cohabitation within digital space. The research is based on the analysis of the project’s visual and textual materials, as well as on a series of interviews conducted with the artist, the curator, and the participants involved in the performance. The investigation focused on reconstructing the networks of people, collaborations, and materials that made the project possible, and on examining how the work was received and discussed on Instagram, with particular attention to the effects it generated within specific digital communities. In dialogue with Shoshana Zuboff’s (2019) reflection on surveillance capitalism and Anna Tsing’s studies (2021) on mycelium and interdependence, MyceliuMinds is interpreted as a form of symbolic resistance and relational experimentation. The article aims to show how practices of digital artivism can open spaces for agency and collective reflection, suggesting new modes of coexistence and political imagination within the context of social media platforms.

The increasing presence of algorithmic platforms within daily life calls for a reconfiguration of how people create, and how audiences engage with creativity: both professional and amateur creators must now navigate the challenge of performing for a potentially limitless audience embedded within an endless, algorithmically curated feed. This article examines Ratatouille: The Musical, a (mostly) crowd-sourced project born out of pandemic-fuelled boredom on TikTok, as a case study of cultural production on a platform structured by algorithmic visibility. We use this to understand the role that recommendation algorithms play in the popularisation of a given phenomenon, as well as how algorithmically imagined audiences (Jones, 2023) can participate in the development of a project. Moreover, we interrogate the concept of liveness, traditionally tied to co-present theatrical performance, to question how it might be redefined within digital, asynchronous, and algorithmically mediated contexts. By situating Ratatouille: The Musical within these intersecting frameworks, the article highlights how TikTok functions not merely as a platform for dissemination, but as a site of emergent, networked forms of performance and cultural production.

This paper examines memory as a practice of resistance within platform capitalism, where the production and storage of data function as instruments of control and epistemic inequality. The first section explores how artificial intelligence, far from being neutral, reflects and amplifies the power structures of cognitive capitalism, producing new forms of algorithmic colonization (Birhane, 2020; Crawford, 2021). In this perspective, memory is no longer a neutral repository but a field of symbolic struggle: its decolonization requires rethinking datasets, hierarchies of knowledge, and the narratives they encode.The second section focuses on the work of African American artist Stephanie Dinkins, who, through projects such as Not the Only One, employs artificial intelligence to restore voice and memory to Afro-descendant communities. Her artivist practice builds counter-archives that give rise to algorithmic posthumous subjectivities endowed with agency, proposing a situated and affective use of data as a form of digital memory activism. Dinkins demonstrates how technology can be reclaimed to subvert the extractive logics of algorithmic systems and to generate a decolonial imaginary of artificial intelligence.

The paper offers a critical reading of François Knoetze’s audiovisual work Core Dump (2018–2019) as an aesthetic device that interrogates the colonial and racial genealogies underpinning the modern technological imaginary. Structured into four chapters situated along the global supply chain of technological production, Core Dump unsettles the presumed linearity of progress and, through the computational metaphor of the core dump, activates a reflection on alternative “restore points” from which colonial temporality might be reconfigured. Drawing on the Critical Computation Bureau’s notion of “recursive colonialism” (2021), the paper shows how Core Dump constructs a colonial genealogy of the machine, inscribing the racialized Black body at the very core of modern technicity and challenging the servo-instrumental rationality that grounds modern epistemology in its technical articulation (Atanasoski and Vora 2019). Through an analysis of the cyborg figures emerging across the videos, the article highlights the ways in which the work subverts the master/slave relation and imagines unsettling alliances between racialized subjectivities and technical objects. Knoetze’s technopoetics thus destabilizes the recursive structure of modern racial epistemology and operates as a prefiguration of postcolonial technological futures–futures in which the toxicity and material waste of technological modernity are transformed into possibilities for liberation and for a renewed conceptualization of the human.

This study aims to investigate the gradual erosion of the bottom-up nature of the Internet and its cultural and political outcomes by addressing OTT platforms through the notion of heterotopia. This approach is rooted in Foucault’s idea of a space connected to all other spaces in such a way as to suspend, neutralise, or invert the relationships they define. Moreover, it incorporates Burgin’s application of this concept to media studies, describing how displaced films or film fragments circulating within different media spaces bring their specific temporality therein. From this perspective, OTT platforms can be understood as heterotopic media environments for two main reasons. Firstly, they incorporate items from cinema and television, creating a space in which even platform-specific artefacts – the originals – are nonetheless derived from these media. Additionally, they reproduce dynamics typical of traditional media within the web, reinstating broadcasting habits and precluding explicit interaction with content and among users. When contrasted with alternative models, namely P2P architectures, this scenario reveals clear consequences for the audience’s cultural role. Indeed, within these heterotopias, users are relegated to passive consumers, excluded from processes that contribute to the construction of culture, as they are not part of a structure that allows them to determine what is worth spreading and preserving as cultural heritage. 

This article compares two international directors who have made the fusion of theatre and cinema their stylistic signature: Christiane Jatahy and Katie Mitchell. In particular, it analyses how, through these two languages, they manage to innovate narrative dynamics even in the staging of classical texts, reactivating thematic themes and bringing them into dialogue with the contemporary world, in terms of both narration and enjoyment. For both authors, it will be investigated how the use of cinematic editing on stage modifies both the temporality of the story and its spatial construction, triggering multiple narrative possibilities that intersect on stage. Starting from similar dynamics in the use of a hybrid, frontier language, in which film grammar is inserted into the theatrical scene, we will highlight different results, aesthetic/narrative effects and significant mechanisms, which in both cases are capable of opening up new perspectives for the audience.

This paper is part of an investigation I conducted on the vocal phenomenon, aimed at revaluing and re-signifying the political and identity-related potential of the singing voice. As a reaction to the traditional supremacy of the word and the hegemony of discourse, the choice to specifically use the singing voice as the horizon of reference for my analysis reflects the desire to emancipate the voice from its traditional ancillary status as a mere medium of language and to reclaim its more intrinsic potential. The disciplinary framework of this research is clearly that of Voice Studies, which I have complemented with perspectives drawn from Gender Studies and Queer Studies, in an attempt to realize a productive and cooperative synthesis. The aim of this work is not to provide an overly ambitious and exhaustive treatment of the vocal phenomenon, but rather to propose—in series and drawing extensively from the disciplinary field of Voice Studies—those contributions that have outlined features of the vocal phenomenon which serve to reveal its implicit expressive and identity-forming potential. I will therefore begin with the recovery of vocal materiality as suggested by Roland Barthes and then bring in the valuable contributions of feminist philosophers Adriana Cavarero and Ann J. Cahill and ethnomusicologist Katherine Meizel, who have respectively discussed the uniqueness/plurality of the voice, the notions of intervocality and multivocality, as intrinsic identity-related characteristics of the vocal phenomenon.

This contribution investigates the role and transformative potential of artist residencies as liminal spaces that resist the productivist logics of contemporary performance and experiment with new forms of relation, creation, and community engagement. Far from being mere sites of artistic production, residencies are conceived as laboratories of sharing and co-creation, where embodiment and participant agency play a constitutive role in both artistic and social processes.
The study focuses on Dies Irae. Concerto per donne e martelli, a seven-day residency at L’Arboreto – Teatro Dimora in Mondaino, led by performer Gloria Dorliguzzo and musician Gianluca Feccia. Through an ethnographic approach integrating observation, interviews, focus groups, and digital diaries via WhatsApp, the research examines the transformative dynamics emerging between artists, participants, and creative processes, showing how residency ecosystems enable new configurations of roles, power, and shared practice.

Our paper aims to investigate the potential of artistic practices co-designed with rural communities to stimulate collective reflection on the trauma of diaspora. Specifically, adopting the action research methodology and the theoretical framework of cultural welfare, the paper focused on analysing the artistic residency of Italian-American performer Joe Sannicandro in the rural village of Colle Sannita (Benevento). The study revealed how, through the pedagogy of listening, Joe Sannicandro’s experience contributed to the symbolic reappropriation of the territory, metaphorically healing the pain caused by the trauma of diaspora linked to mass emigration and the depopulation of rural areas.

The essay investigates the role of university heritage as a communicative device capable of generating symbolic value, shaping representational processes, and opening new spaces for public reflection. Traditionally portrayed through media stereotypes or conventional institutional imagery, the university can instead become a laboratory of critical heritage communication, in which photography performs not only documentary and narrative functions but also aesthetic, performative, and transformative ones. Through broad, interdisciplinary theoretical references and by engaging with visual experiences such as Ghirri’s Viaggio in Italia and Toscani’s campaigns, the essay argues that academic spaces can be reinterpreted as sites of aesthetic tension, semantic pluralism, and “visual dissent.” In this framework, the image acts as a detonator of meaning and a tool of civic mediation, capable of fostering dialogue, reactivating collective imagination, and reframing knowledge as a common good,

This contribution explores performative artistic research as a critical practice for questioning the contemporary Mediterranean in its necropolitical devices, with particular attention to the territories of central-southern Italy and inland areas. Through the intertwining of Performance Studies, post- and decolonial theories, and neo-materialist perspectives, the reflection revolves around three key notions: “necropolitics”, in the sense proposed by Achille Mbembe, as the exercise of sovereignty over life and death; “necrowritings”, according to Cristina Rivera Garza, as forms of writing traversed by restless deaths and the residues of the human; and “epistemic disarmament”, as the suspension of dominant epistemologies and openness to mediumistic, relational and trans-corporeal knowledge. Through the analysis of three works — The Last Lamentation by Valentina Medda, Attuning to / Resonating with (Sulcis) by Nicola Di Croce and Body Farm by Silvia Rampelli — the text highlights how performance, in its postures of subtraction and impermanence, elaborates practices of attunement and de-composition capable of questioning the necropolitical regimes that traverse the Mediterranean. The research arrives at the definition of disarmament as an epistemic, methodological and aesthetic practice: a gesture of dispossession and unlearning (Spivak), which suspends the representative will in order to open up spaces of commonality, reparation and re-emergence of the more-than-human.

A conversation with the British actor and director Sam Crane, co-author alongside Pinny Grylls of the documentary Grand Theft Hamlet (UK, 2024, 91’).

L’articolo analizza SONS: SER O NO SER de La Fura dels Baus come rilettura post-drammatica e immersiva dell’Amleto shakespeariano. Attraverso un’analisi della drammaturgia frammentata, dell’apparato tecnologico e delle strategie di coinvolgimento dello spettatore, il contributo evidenzia come lo spettacolo trasformi il dilemma amletico “essere o non essere” in una questione eminentemente politica ed esistenziale, strettamente legata alle condizioni del contemporaneo: capitalismo, collasso climatico, sovraesposizione mediatica e crisi dell’identità. L’interazione con il pubblico viene interpretata come dispositivo di responsabilizzazione collettiva, più che come reale agency partecipativa. Ne emerge un teatro che rinuncia allo shock provocatorio per farsi strumento di autoanalisi socio-culturale, interrogando lo spettatore sul proprio ruolo di “figlio” e co-responsabile del presente.