Vocal Practices and Collective Narrations

Sara Basta invites participants to engage with Chiara Camoni’s work by exploring language in its many forms. Listening, observing and looking become tools for connection and openness towards a wider community. The Pavilion space is thus transformed into a living workshop, where reading, discussion and painting take place in different areas, generating shared signs and narratives that intertwine individual and collective experience.

Participation is free of charge, but registration is required by 25 October. Please email: iscrizione@lungomare.org

Adriana Cavarero is one of Italy’s most influential philosophers, a former lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Verona and currently director of the Hannah Arendt Study Centre at the same university. Her work explores themes such as gender difference, narrative, identity and vulnerability. Her major works include: Nonostante Platone and Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti. In her recent book Il canto delle sirene(Castelvecchi), she reinterprets the myth of the sirens from a philosophical perspective, weaving together voice, myth and politics.

Felice Cimatti teaches Semiotics and Language Theory at the University of Calabria. His studies focus on the relationship between language, animality and mysticism. He hosts the radio programme Uomini e Profeti on Rai Radio3. Over recent years, he has combined his philosophical work with his own artistic practice, which explores the inscrutability of the animal gaze

SAWT is a project exploring the ritual practice of the Aita, an ancient poetic song from the Moroccan tradition. Aita is the profound story that tears through the voice of the countryside, an oral archive handed down over centuries of life, love, pain and resistance. There is a life and there are words that lie in the deepest recesses of our feeling; that state emerges with the surrender of reason, swimming in the darkness of our fears, yielding to oblivion, rejecting control; that voice is set free like the very first cry of which we have no memory, only the certainty of its meaning: I exist.

As part of the Italian Pavilion’s Public Program, SAWT further develops through a four-day residency, taking place from 22 to 25 October with the support of local partner Spazio Punch. Participants selected through an open call will accompany Wissal Houbabi in her research process, bringing her practice into dialogue with the voices and experiences of Venice. The performance on 30 October brings the outcome of this encounter to the Pavilion, opening up the research to new perspectives and forms of sharing.

SAWT is a performance rooted in a research project supported by the FONDO network for emerging creativity and adapted for the Public Program of the Italian Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale.

Cecilia Canziani is an art historian and independent curator. Her work focuses on contemporary artistic practice, writing and teaching on contemporary visual culture, and collaboration as a curatorial methodology. She is co-founder of the contemporary art research centre IUNO and of the Les Cerises publishing project for children’s artist’s books. She teaches Phenomenology of Contemporary Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in L’Aquila. She has been following the work of Chiara Camoni since 2010, of whom she edited her first monograph (NERO, 2017) and, since 2018, they have worked together on the touring research project La Giusta Misura.

Francesco Ventrella teaches art history at the University of Sussex, where he is affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence. In 2007, he was a visiting fellow at the CATH Centre, University of Leeds; between 2013 and 2016, he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, and in 2019 he received the Paul Mellon Rome Fellowship at the British School at Rome. Francesco has explored gender and corporeality in art writing, and his research in the field of feminist and queer art history focuses on affective categories such as enthusiasm, empathy and resonance to rethink the relationship between sexuality, gender and modernity. He co-edited, together with Giovanna Zapperi, the volume Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: the Legacy of Carla Lonzi(Bloomsbury, 2021).

The workshop explores language as a mobile space, marked by memory, conflict, translation, and transformation. Voice, collective reading, manual practices, and writing become tools for interrogating words and concepts, questioning their established meanings and forms. Books, archives, and toolkits from the research center The Recovery Plan constitute a toolbox to be opened and activated together. Through readings and conversations, a Counter-Dictionary will take shape over the afternoon and be presented at the end of the day.

Places are limited. To participate, please email by 28 October: iscrizione@lungomare.org