Siate misteriosi e sarete felici
(If you’ll be mysterious, you will be happy)
This sentence was sculpted on wood at the entrance of Gauguin’s house on the Hiva Oa island. This is the title I have chosen for my actual research.
The work is part of a wider project based on the idea to experience time and space in a different ways through collective actions with the aim to blur the line between objects and subjects and other kinds of dualisms.
In a letter of 1939 Walter Benjamin writes about the end of time saying that the ideas and the pieces of art will join the realm of nature as, like nature, they reveal themselves by veiling themselves. Thus, the objects exist at the same time in a mysterious as well in an open way. Within the frame of Ricerca X I will be looking to create a set of tools to process behavior as a movement and collective behavior as a choreography. Specifically I am interested to understand how a collective behavior can affect the space and create a specific atmosphere.
bio
Ambra Pittoni is a performance artist and researcher interested in how the entanglement between bodily practices and spatial circumstances emerge as a territory of affectivity and as a vehicle of unexplored epistemological potentialities. To that extent she uses choreography, somatic practices, installation, sound and writing to explore and produce fictional bodies, knowing modalities, collective circumstances of getting
to know.
Together with Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti she found The School of the End of Time, a research based institution with a non hierarchical approach between theoretical and artistic research.
Since 2018 she is part of the curatorial team of Workspace Ricerca X – Dramaturgy and research.
She graduated at the University Paris 8 with a thesis on The end of art and she is a PhD candidate at the Linz
University of the Arts with the project The promise of the abyss – Body practices and new spaces of knowledge. In 2022 she has been a fellow of the VALIE EXPORT center. Among others she presented her works at OGR (Turin), PAV (Turin), Fondazione Baruchello (Rome), Crédac (Ivry sur Seine), De Appel (Amsterdam), Maga Museum of art (Milan), CCA Zamek Ujazdowski (Warsaw), Ashkal Alwan (Beyrut), Roberta (Frankfurt), Sophiensaele (Berlin). She has been visiting professor at NABA (Milan) and ENSAPC (Cergy). Recent publications are The Saintly Hypochondriac, by The School of the End of Time) published in L’ANO SOLARE, a year long programme about sex and self-display, curated by Il Colorificio, published by Axis Axis, Ten obvious and not so obvious questions about artistic research, in the Artistes Chercheur.es / Chercheur.es artistes Performer Les Savoirs, curated by Chloé Dechery and Marion Boudier and published by Les presses du réel.