It means first of all looking at a map, a landscape, a place, large or small, and finding within it those atoms of substance that we may call Points. Each Point is a small world. A non-infinite, though broad, range of possibilities could occur in there.
Each world is inhabited by a Guest, who may be an individual or a community, a couple of people or a larger collective; what we do know is that the Guest will name the Point, and the Point will be the place where a world capable of encompassing the universes of both will arise.
Amigdala Collective
–From the Village Lexicon, The State of Places
Periferico is an international festival of site-specific performance practices. Born in 2008 in nomadic form, building ad hoc programming of meetings, performances, concerts and installations in multiple neighborhoods of the city of Modena; the areas identified over the years have, not surprisingly, gone through profound social and urban transformation, as is still the case with the Artisan Village of West Modena where Periferico has resided since 2016.
Curated by the Amigdala collective, itself a place of intertwining disciplines, Peripheral embraces art and performance, music and theater, architecture and civic design Based on the idea of promoting the development of artistic practices as well as individual works; through site-specific processes, Periferico illuminates spaces otherwise separated or hidden from the everyday gaze of the citizen.
The festival takes place in non-theater venues chosen for their architectural interest or importance to the city’s history, to be inhabited with interventions that enhance the space and its meaning. Over the years we have been able to see the great interest the public has in this mode of work, as they can access unseen spaces where they are not normally allowed to move freely: factories, archives, warehouses, industrial spaces or little-known places in the city.
The Periferico festival has now assumed the status of a recognized and wide-ranging event; guest artists are invited looking carefully at the quality of the projects, without excluding artistic languages a priori. Based on a process of residency, observation of the area and meeting with communities, the artistic direction and artists jointly consider adapting new, existing or specially made works for the festival.
This long process is actually accomplished from a willingness to dialogue and listen.
Periferico’s mode of work allows for the development of multiple cross-cutting relationships that the Amigdala Association builds from time to time with private entities (private companies, artisans, art galleries, creative enterprises etc) and public entities (archives, libraries, universities etc). The main consequence of this is a broadening of audiences to sectors not normally interested in theater, as well as the creation of initiatives (often outdoors) in peripheral and sometimes degraded areas of the city.
Because of its ability to unite and connect multiple dots in the same artistic context, the Periferico festival has an open and constructive dialogue with several associations in the area, including CivicWise Italia and Archivio Architetto Cesare Leonardi, both of which operate year-round at OvestLab, home to all the activities promoted by collective Amigdala in the Villaggio Artigiano.
Walking pace
A docu-film made by Amigdala and Marcella Menozzi with the intention of documenting the process of building the Peripheral festival FutureAntenate and at the same time tell about the area of the Craftsman Village of West Modena and the gradual extinction of its peculiarities that made it the cradle of the ingenuities of the Modenese mechanical sector.
The dream, understood as the ability of art
Of working on the invisible.
Intimacy, as a specific quality
of an artistic practice aimed
at reconstructing affective ties between people and places.
Walking, as a practice of exploration
of the landscape that focuses
on the relationship between body, landscape and vision.
The city map is rewritten through work that connects territorial activation, urban planning reflection and participatory art.
The spaces traversed are diverse and manifold: from the former FFSS station postal delivery to the Municipal Archives, from the R-North working-class apartment building to the state-of-the-art Tecnord factory, from the Officina Emilia museolaboratory to the West Modena Crafts Village.
Le edizioni del festival
PERIFERICO 2022
Periferico 2021
Peripheral 2020
Peripheral 2019
Peripheral 2018
Peripheral 2017
Peripheral 2016
Peripheral 2015
Peripheral 2013/2014
Peripheral 2012
Peripheral 2011
