Welcome to an alternative Soup Kitchen at Rosendal Teater, where we have a free dinner together in the café before moving over to Sal 1 for a talk to remember. In the talk we will meet Italian artist Chiara Bersani and curator and producer Giulia Traversi, with Mara Pieri attending digitally. The talk will be streamed as part of A SERIES OF MORE-THAN-HUMAN ENCOUNTERS (read more at the bottom of the article).

Click on the link to watch the live stream on Vimeo.
EVERYBODY IS IN NEED OF CARE

Bersani and Traversi have been working and travelling together for almost ten years. During that period of making and presenting art, care work – compensating for and supporting each other – has become a major part of what they do. It has shaped how they do what they do, as well as how they think about it.

As a disabled woman born and raised in Italy, Chiara describes the informal networks of care that have been with her throughout her childhood and adult life. Both the help she has needed, as well as the assistance she has given. She also describes the dismay, sorrow and anger at discovering that after many years of “looking for informal care networks” in order to work, “other people in other parts of Europe had welfare and were doing the same things [she] was doing, but with a paid person to accompany them”.

Discourses around care – the championing of alliances and kinships, as well as strategies of collective support and mutual aid – have been given significant theoretical depth by intersectional feminist and more-than-human thinkers such as Donna Haraway, María Puig de la Bellacasa and Joan Tronto, for example. With more-than-human discourses in particular emphasising notions of interdependency and the mutuality of care – as well as challenging imperialist, patriarchal and capitalist framings of care. Chiara and Giulia ask, however, when the theory turns into practice, body and fatigue, does it really work? Where does care end and care begin? What happens when that caring relationship is monetised?

Drawing upon and responding to more-than-human and intersectional feminist accounts of care, and exploring the formal and informal economies and spontaneous networks of such work, Chiara and Giulia will open up a discussion on the many questions their joint care work has raised.

Read the artists' own reflections before the talk:

A dictionary road.

How long does it take for a word to become rhetorical?

How much time it takes for an urgent question to be consumed?

After how long do images go from visionary to stereotypical?

After all the sprouting of urgency in recent years, we were under the illusion that bodies had finally risen up. However, as the debate advances, it faces storms in between.

Today we look at the loss of meaning of words that were once dear to us and wish to try and give them a second chance. Because some of them have become estranged and others have been weaponized, stolen, risignified in unforeseen ways. Because the attempt to simplify what is complex leads to emptying.

Today we collect words that were fundamental to us, life-saving words, words that allowed us to cross the woods without getting lost, without dying. These emptied words now roll around us like empty shells, carelessly uttered because the world always goes faster than us.

Today, we would like to walk the secret road of thorny thoughts to abandon quick definitions and fill words with contradictory questions. And trace with you our dictionary road.

Chiara Bersani is an Italian performer and author active in the field of performing arts, research theater and contemporary dance. As an interpreter and as a director / choreographer moves through different languages and visions. Her works, presented in international circuits, are born as creations in dialogue with spaces of different nature and are mainly aimed at a "neighbor" to the scene. Her research as an interpreter and author is based on the concept of the “Political Body” and the creation of practices aimed at training its presence and action. The "manifest" work of this research is Gentle Unicorn, a performance included in the Aerowaves platform. For the rigor in embodying this study she is awarded the UBU Award for best new actress / performer under 35 for 2018. In August 2019, during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Gentle Unicorn and Chiara Bersani won the first prize in the dance category of the Total Theater Awards. Chiara Bersani is an artist of Apap – Advancing Performing arts project - Feminist Future util 2024.

Giulia Traversi
While still at university, they specialised in the analysis of the theatre scene and theatre criticism by working at Atti and Sipari magazine as editor and person in charge of the organisation. In 2012, they started to delve into theatre promotion and communication work by attending a course at the Case hello Spettatore in Rome. In 2014, they were an organiser and promoter at the NID Italian dance platform and from 2015 to 2017, they worked at the promotion and communication office of the Teatro Nazionale della Toscana, while also promoting the following artists: Laura Rossi, Azulteatro, Teatropersona, Irene Russolillo, Silvia Pasello and Fracesca Grilli. In 2017, they directed their first festival, as Artistic Director, at the Teatro di Via Verdi in Vicopisano. They also created the Festival La torre Starta. A queer festival in Pisa.

They now work as manager and curator of the performer and choreographer Chiara Bersani, with whom they share artistic co-direction of Spazio For, to promote the choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni at the national and international level.

About A SERIES OF MORE-THAN-HUMAN ENCOUNTERS

With room for artistic performances and in kinship with our more-than-human relatives, it investigates human to more-than-human relations and conditions of co-existence in a world that has been modelled in a context of imperialism, patriarchy and capitalism.

This series elaborates on different ways of being and different ways of knowledge, on what can be known and what will never be knowable. With the forest, the mountains and the deep sea as our thinking companions, you are invited to come and discover what lies behind the horizon of human knowledge.

After two seasons in Brussels, we continue this rich and long-term series with partners from both the arts and academia from various European cities. Each evening takes place in one of the venues, and will be livestreamed for anybody who lives further away.

A Series of More-Than-Human Encounters is a collaboration between VUB Crosstalks and Kaaitheater (Brussels) Artea - Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha and La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Rosendal Teater and The environmental humanities research group at NTNU (Trondheim), Framer Framed (Amsterdam).

Presented by Kaaitheater, Crosstalks VUB, Rosendal Teater & The environmental humanities research group at NTNU