Peripheral 2019

The 11th edition of Peripheral travels the radical path of a festival where performance is not “consumed,” but where artistic practices of connecting with places are actively experimented with. In addition to the Amigdala collective, which presides over the direction of the project, there are six artistic figures convened to decline their presence within the Artisan Village of West Modena, the historic neighborhood of active or disused house-workshops where Amigdala has been working for four years.

Dewey Dell, Effetto Larsen, Enrico Malatesta, DOM-/Leonardo Delogu and Valerio Sirna, Isabella Bordoni and Archivio Architetto Cesare Leonardi curate a vertical programming, where each day is named by its own signature: their works-performances, concerts, installations-will be alternated with moments of expression of their own imagery thanks to the presence of guests called to speak publicly.

Each artist came up with site-specific creations or adapted his or her own works during a residency in which the neighborhood’s tangible and intangible heritage-its sounds and landscapes, its industrial spaces and house courtyards, the identity and voices of its inhabitants-is brought into play and transformed by different languages.

Each day of the festival will bring the audience to experience a mode of traversal, a specific point of view on how body, sound and speech can enter into dialogue with the disused workshops of the West Modena Artisan Village and its community of inhabitants.
The festival’s programming is inaugurated by Amigdala with Elemental, a performance-ritual that founds a temporary alliance between audience and performers, summoned through uninterrupted singing to wait for dawn in a space equipped for sleep. The event is carried out as part of Transparency Festival.

Latitude and Longitude of a Grain of Sand thus starts with the idea of making sense of an encounter between an artist and a place, without defining it a priori. As in a box that opens, to allow us together to observe its mechanism, the artists will be found at the very moment they are questioning their making, in the midst of a conversation in tension between their research and the real of a specific place. This encounter, this field of action, is therefore the minimum point that Peripheral 2019 has chosen to interrogate, sounding out its utopian coordinates.

Buoyed by the need to make the experiential status of artistic practices more evident, and to put the vicissitudes of a question and its time at the center of the festival, we chose an image that for us identifies the departure and sediment of the artistic process: that of a grain of sand that, jamming an all too oiled gear, opens the way for a crack, a glow, what is most fertile in an unexpected.