When Chiara Bersani says curating is like “planting a garden,” she’s not speaking in metaphor. As one of the guest curators for Bastard 2025, alongside fellow Italian curator and producer Giulia Traversi, Chiara is cultivating something deliberately organic: an artistic space shaped by care, risk, and attention to the margins.

Both artists come from places often overlooked in the cultural map of Europe. Chiara has a disability, and grew up in a small village in northern Italy, where community came naturally - until she moved to the city at 14 and encountered the force of exclusion. “That contrast shaped me,” she says. “I live and work from the margins, where perspective shifts. Sometimes it becomes clearer, more focused.”

Giulia was raised in the south and left home at 18 to study theatre, first as a playwright before finding her calling behind the scenes. Today, she works across Italy, designing structures that support artists and prioritise accessibility. “Curating is about imagining new worlds,” she says. “And I believe the revolution should be done with joy.”

Their collaboration at Bastard 2025 is as much about creating conditions as selecting content. Together with the theatre’s artistic and managing director, they’ve co-curated a handful of performances: emphasizing fluidity, experimentation, and exchange.

“This is my first time curating outside Italy” says Giulia. “It’s been a joy to shape something with the team and the artists - on equal footing.

We’re asking: can a festival be a temporary community, with real, meaningful exchanges between people and performance?

For Chiara, the project is less a fixed goal than an ongoing conversation. “I rarely begin with an objective. But I do hope some of the questions we carry become shared. If even one idea lands in someone else’s body and starts to move— then something important has happened.”

That ethos is reflected in the performances they’ve curated:

aCORdo by Alice Ripoll/ Cia REC

DOPA by Anne Lise Le Gac & more

Darkness Picnic by DOM-

Cuerpos Celestes by El Conde De TorreFiel

Each work engages with the body, space, or presence in its own radical way, resisting fixed forms and leaning into the unpredictable.

Formats are stretched, spaces are unsettled, and the rules are mostly there to be rewritten.

For Chiara and Giulia, curating isn’t about control, it’s about conditions. About what might grow when care meets risk, when joy becomes a method, and when the margins are allowed to speak.

At Bastard, those things aren’t just welcome. They’re the point.