Dove cresce ciò che salva | Sentimental Archive of Movement was born in 2022 from the encounter with Lamia Santolina, garden house and art residence of Cosimo Terlizzi and Damien Modolo located in the town of Carovigno, in the province of Brindisi.

amia Santolina is characterised as an avant-garde place with respect to the relationship between man and nature. Here the human presence loses its centrality and becomes a humble and simple observer of a nature that lives, generates and dies without human intervention.

The research unfolds in 4 stages that follow the rhythm of the seasons: through the changing landscape, through the cycles of the seasons, contact with nature and knowledge of plants takes place. The experimentation of the relationship passes through different stages, ranging from the investigation of the collective ritual as a recovery of an ancestral relationship, to the research on the body that becomes a natural element, to the practical doing that characterises the relationship with a garden. This research very soon gives rise to an archive, a collection of sounds, photos, movements, sensory experiences that invest not only the senses but also, more profoundly, feeling.
The process now encounters a new phase and brings with it a question:
how to put the collected elements into dialogue, what to tell about the archive and how?

Francesca’s narrative voice, off-screen, becomes a narrative device to narrate the process and accompany the performative act, to open up questions and reflections on the relationship between human being and nature, but also to bring the spectator inside the thoughts that move the creative process itself. The story, with its informal tone, brings out the author’s doubts, the not-knowing that drives all research, but also the wonder of the encounter with the unknown and with past and incorporated physical experience.

She stands alongside, as a witness to the body that on the stage space itself becomes landscape, traversed by the memory and incorporation of those specific states of body and mind, of presence therefore, that the encounter with nature has brought to life.
The voice becomes body, presence that leads the spectator into vision and imagination. In a continuous chase between what is heard and what is seen (and their non-correspondence), we question ourselves with the limit that every creation brings with it: the impossibility of containing everything.

It is only some of the natural elements encountered (branches, fatuous oats, lupins, roots, leaves and mud, etc.) that find space on the scene, among all, the stones: enigmatic witnesses, bones of the earth, skeleton of the world, presences perhaps, that more than others allow us to perceive a possible intimate reunion with the world in which we live and which has generated us. They perhaps push us towards a new awareness: towards the recognition of the right to existence of all creatures.
In the closed space of the theatre, we want to bring in the many worlds we have crossed with a conviction, which becomes an underlying warning: it is out there, in the whole of nature, of animals and plants, the place from which to start again, and that our life, to quote Ginevra Bompiani, is among them or it is not.

The outcome follows an artistic residency from 23 to 26 February and the workshop Dove cresce ciò che salva on 21 and 22 February

Duration: 45′