ALESSANDRO CARBONI
art practice and research strategies

Always Becoming# is a erratic platform of research that reflects on the notion of body by combining performative practices, embodiment processes, mapping of urban space, critical cartography and experimental geography. Conceived of as a collaborative operating system, the project moves from an urban context to another. The project aims to open up endless possibilities and questions about contemporary city, posture and potentialities of citizens, perception of the bodies and spaces in arts, founding itself on the interdependence between science, practice and production. Assuming that the actual form of mobility does not resolve power differences, but rather intensifies them, the errantry spirit of Always Becoming# intends to deal with the contradictions and paradoxes of our historical condition. Opening up with radical questioning, making fluid of fixed norms and identities, time and space will be approached from a variety of viewpoints: artistic, political, social. The project brings together performers, theorists, artists and curators to reflect on body as vector, as a tool and not as a condition, to analyze the embedded forces that regulate the contemporary life, collaborative and collective dynamic of art production.  

The research period is envisioned as oscillating between moments of urban explorations, performances, workshops, rehearsal, (focused, informal) presentations and (longer) outdoor practice sessions. At the end of the research period, the project is presented in the form long durational performance named Corporeal-Maps, where performers present a selection of gestures and actions previously collected in the different urban spaces that Always Becoming# inhabits. Not only events, situations, happenings, but also geometrical shapes, traces, stains and objects are explored, mapped and collected – as urban spatial data – individually by each performer through an embodiment process of accumulation-disassembly-reassembly, and the data are transformed into performative sequences through choreographic thinking. The whole process is made possible by using EM:tools for urban mapping, a system in continuous transformation designed by Alessandro Carboni.

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