XL | Chapter II
Fourth event of INBTWN – In Between programme
Curated by Claudia D’Alonzo
Mara Oscar Cassiani
Bondone(2020)
Website, performance, talk
19 November-11 December 2020
Performance live streaming | Tuesday 1 December 2020
Online talk | Friday 11 December
Featuring: Mara Oscar Cassiani in dialogue with Claudia D’Alonzo and Maria Paola Zedda
XL was and will be the new format of Centrale Fies, originally conceived for the 40th anniversary of Drodesera and the 20th of Fies. Today it finds a new correlation in the analysis of an “oversize” that breaks the summer one shot, weaving together all the annual events of Centrale Fies.
Tuesday the 1st and Friday the 11th of December, the virtual spaces of Centrale Fies will host the performance by post-media artist and performer Mara Oscar Cassiani who will present her new work: Bondone.
The project will be online from the 19th of November onwards on the website www.inbtwn.it and will be the fourth and last event of INBTWN – In Between. Premiering at Centrale Fies, the work hybridises the traditions of Trentino and the folklores of the web, drawing on a cultural landscape that ranges from the snowboard community to fantasy videogames. The artist appropriates collective imaginaries, rituals and the legacy of the Dionysian in contemporary times to deconstruct gender roles and lines.perfor
INBTWN, a programme curated by Claudia D’Alonzo, follows the artist’s research and production process and presents it through two diverse moments and formats. In the first part, from the 19th November, the website www.inbtwn.it will follow Mara Oscar Cassiani’s ongoing research throughout the entire duration of the project. By doing so, users will be progressively guided towards the second part of the project: a brand-new performance in which the atlas of symbols built until then will engage in a direct dialogue with Mara Oscar Cassiani’s own body. The performance will be live streamed on the 1st of December on INBTWN’s website, allowing the audience to immerse into the artist’s visual imaginary. The project and the event programme will end with a talk featuring Mara Oscar Cassiani in conversation with curator Claudia D’Alonzo, as well as curator and Nao Performing Festival co-director Maria Paola Zedda.
Bondone is a mountain located in Western Trentino that characterises part of the territory and the landscape that Centrale Fies is part of. Mount Bondone is a popular destination for skiers and snowboarders, and, as other sport sites, is a place where Mara Oscar Cassiani moves beyond the unspoken limitations of her gender. On sky tracks as well as in many other places, she is among the few who ride a “surf snow”, a wide board conceived for wet snow and designed without edges, thus requiring a technique generally considered too hard for women. Hence, departing from her biography and following the stories of powerful androgynous avatars in the gaming world, the artist envisages a symbology and an appropriative ritual training in conjunction with the opening of the winter season rituals.
The project stems from the artist’s participation in the 2019 edition of Trentino Brand New – which will also see her among the protagonists of this year’s edition. An annual project by Centrale Fies, Trentino Brand New is dedicated to the training and designing of unconventional ways to narrate and communicate the local territory, and is curated by Elisa Di Liberato and Virginia Somadossi for Centrale Fies and Fies Core. During her last participation in the project, the artist had worked with a team of young people on the Krampus tradition, disclosing in such figures belonging to Trentino folklore the rebirth of a relationship between seasonal rites and female character and avatars. A relationship much present in the past, but now gone lost in many popular festivities and traditions.
“The Krampus are demons servants of Saint Nicholas – says the artist. They are ferocious, violent and savage in their raids around local villages, as during the parades they release the energies accumulated throughout the rest of the year. The Krampe (female for Krampus) can in turn go beyond their everyday limits through a night of raids aka to rave. As part of a dynamic and ethnographic vision, with rituals undergoing an evolution, the Krampus ritual is not just mixing with the new forms of the Fantasy genre, but is starting – perhaps also thanks to the latter – to be colonised by other genres.”
From such experiences developed across the territory of Centrale Fies, together with the old and new traditions that inhabit it, the artist conceived a work between performance and visual arts, which focuses on physical strength, the power of bodies and violence within a gendered perspective. From sports practiced on the slopes of Trentino to the avatars of video games female warriors, the artist investigates representations, rituals and visual codes of traditional cultures and compares them with web and post-media cultures’ iconographies.
Mara Oscar Cassiani, is a Wi-Fi-based artist working between performance, choreography, new digital languages, social media and ritual clubbing. Her research focuses on the creation of a contemporary imaginary, where new grammar systems and icons arise from Internet identities, club subcultures and brutal capitalism. A live stream of images and consciousness. Her main research focuses on the development of performative environments and projects between a generational group and their ritual development. A melting pot of excerpts from pop, commercial language, ritual and digital folklore, providing a global snapshot, a “visual fast food” between kitsch, raw rituality and apocalypse.
To stay updated with XL programing please visit http://www.centralefies.it/xl