The work of Amigdala activates several levels: original artistic creations, public history and anthropology, active citizenship education, urban crossings and landscape.

Amigdala is a social promotion association and art collective based in Modena, Italy. Itworks in contemporary and performing arts, with a strong interest in urban regeneration and civic innovation.

The collective makes multidisciplinary art productions, with a definite vocation for site-specific and community-specific creation methodologies.
Amigdala's productions take the form of performances, public art projects, installations, soundscapes and always have a strong connection to the place that hosts them. These are works that are presented in Italy and abroad in festivals, reviews and cultural initiatives.

In addition, since 2008 Amigdala has been curating performance and cultural projects, especially focused on site-specific practices and public art, especially in peripheral or rapidly changing urban areas.

The Periferico festival is one of the main projects and is dedicated to the connections between performing arts, local communities and the urban fabric. The festival involves Italian and foreign artists, curators, and theorists in a project that aims to reinterpret the ways in which cultural programming is co-created and the relationship between curating and artistic production.

Since 2017 Amigdala has directed OvestLab (in collaboration with the City of Modena and together with the Cesare Leonardi Architect Archive Association), a multidisciplinary cultural center that operates as a civic factory to support processes of collective re-imagination of the city. Amigdala has extensive experience in implementing community activation and urban regeneration processes and has also developed a specific methodology through the implementation of several participatory projects such as the collective magazine Slingshot and theAfor digital oral history archive.

Amigdala Collective and Periferico festival

"A heterogeneous and plural artistic grouping, for more than a decade the Amigdala Collective has been gathering sensibilities from the worlds of music, drawing, performing arts and architecture in search of portions of reality abandoned to themselves or relegated to the shadowy space of marginality and collective repressed, settling "permanently" since 2016 in a former mechanical workshop, at the Artisan Village in West Modena.

To the disruptive charge of the artistic incursion that transfigures and magnifies, Amigdala accompanies a daily and patient practice of care, aimed at the places it traverses, the inhabitants it encounters and the artists it hosts. It is a declination of integral and long-term site-specific, aimed at a regeneration of the urban marginal that invests and provokes the imaginary, at the junction of memory and imagination.

Curation is also the inspiration behind the artistic direction of Peripheral, a performing arts festival that, in spite of eleven past editions, does not cease to confront even radical redefinitions of roles among artists, curators, private hosts and community-spectators. Increasingly, the festival appears as a high-intensity seminal event of uninterrupted and constant action, the dandelion bursting and seeping through the cracks in the asphalt."