Entering the Romaeuropa Festival hall to watch “Quello che non c’è/ What’s Not There” was like plunging into a world where past, present and virtuality merge into an intense and fragile tale. Giulia Scotti’s intimate and reflective work explores family ties and memories not experienced firsthand but filtered through imagination and pain.
From the first moment, the black-and-white projections of Scotti’s drawings captured me: the detail of the lines, interrupted here and there by touches of red, seemed to flesh out an emotional texture as visceral as it was indefinite, like fragments of memories that do not belong to us. Beside me, silent spectators, also suspended between what they saw and what they perceived.
The true effectiveness of the performance lies in its intermediality: Scotti does not tell a story with words but with a hybrid language, where each element contributes to the construction of a complex sensory experience. Projections dialogue with the performer’s voice, creating a continuous flow of images and sounds that amplify the sense of loss and absence. Lemmo’s synthetic and enveloping music is interwoven with the images, making each moment immersive and unforgettable.
The interaction between virtual and physical emerges as an act of processing and reconciliation, where Scotti, touching the projected images, seems to try to grasp what he cannot have. This gesture amplifies the sense of tension and vulnerability, as if the viewer is witnessing an intimate inner struggle, prompted to reflect on their own lost or never experienced memories.
“What is not there” thus proves to be not only a performance, but an introspective and collective journey, where the unspoken becomes tangible and memory becomes digital and corporeal matter.
Everything is imbued with a feeling of loss, an absence that leaves no respite and manifests itself in the act of touching, as if to fill a void. “What’s Not There” is not only the story of an absence, but also an exploration of memory: how much of what we think we remember is actually experienced, and how much has been passed on to us? Scotti manages to ask these questions with a rare sensitivity, without answers but with the strength of his stage presence.
I leave the room and take with me that suspended question, a trace of what was and was not: just like the memories, elusive and powerful, that this performance was able to evoke.
Lidia De Nuzzo, October 3, 2024
images (all): Giulia Scotti, Quello che non c’è, Romaeuropa Festival 2024, Rome, ph: Carlo Scotti
Giulia Scotti, Quello che non c’è, Romaeuropa Festival 2024 (Anni Luce), Mattatoio, Rome, 02.03.10.2024
The article by Lidia De Nuzzo is part of the Intraspaces editorial project, the sixth edition of Backstage /Onstage, born from a partnership between the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome, Romaeuropa Festival, and Arshake to bring, since 2018, a group of students from the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome behind the scenes of the Romaeuropa Festival. Each year a different editorial project has emerged to flow into the dedicated page that grows as one big archive. The 2024 edition, Intraspaces, ventures into the intrastitial spaces, that is, all those places of connection that connect technologies, artists, space, spectators, sometimes even extending to the territory, where the different institutions that this event manages to involve are located. Participating in this edition were: Giovanni Bernocco, Daniele Bucceri, Stella Landi, Lidia De Nuzzo, Francesca Pascarelli, Anton Tkalenko. Visit the project homepage and the archive of past editions here.
