The 38th edition of the Romaeuropa Festival has been underway for a few weeks now, from 6 September to 19 November, an event that brings to Rome the excellence of the arts, from performance to theatre, dance and digital arts. Always attentive to connecting places and people around the world and building an ever-expanding network of different institutions and realities rooted in the Roman territory, this year geography and multiculturalism take a step forward and take centre stage by tracing a geography of the arts between music, dance, theatre, new circus, creation for children and digital arts.
“DIGITALIVE,” states curator Federica Patti, “presents for the 38th edition of the Romaeuropa Festival a wide range of declinations and reinterpretations of magical thinking. Participants will be able to re-appropriate the structure of technology to organise new rituals of creation of the world, beyond all boundaries, biases and beliefs. At DIGITALIVE, technology is framed as a tool to re-appropriate other, spurious, secondary historical and/or futuristic narratives’.
As every year since 2018, Digitalive returns with Federica Patti’s selection dedicated to algorithmic performance, which this year moves between musical, choreographic and virtual paths and presents from 4 to 8 October an investigation around performing arts, digital cultures and the Metaverse, in an encounter between Italian electronics, artificial intelligences and virtual environments.
Digital sounds move to the Slaughterhouse with the multimedia performance by the Roman collective NONE, which presents its latest production AV Nuovo Mondo (6 October), inspired by Aldous Huxley’s famous dystopian novel, and with the Modenese percussionist, sound artist and curator Riccardo La Foresta, who with Drummophone (6 October) questions the nature of percussion instruments, revealing invisible architectures through sound art and improvisation.
The Grey Line (7 October) is a hypnotic audio-video experience proposed by the SPIME.IM collective, which uses technology, 3D art and electronic music to weave immersive audio-video experiences capable of exploring the boundaries of identity, corporeity and perception. Following this, the Roman artist Arssalendo proposes a special live performance in the set design constructed by Bianca Peruzzi.
Thanks to the renewed dialogue with RE:Humanism Art Prize (8 October), Digitalive will host artist Luca Pagan with his performance Retraining Bodies, which explores the learning methods between the human body and Artificial Intelligence, and Albert.DATA with his musical performance Slowly Fading into Data. The artist and researcher, winner of the REF special mention at the Re:Humanism Prize, presents his debut album with a live performance that tells the story of the transformation of a human being into data.
The series of talks curated by the ADV – Arti Digitali dal Vivo network (7-8 October), created by Anna Maria Monteverdi and Antonio Pizzo as a critical observatory of techno-performative practices, the two appointments with the Erinni collective, the talk Cyber Witchcraft (6 October) and the performance by Ginevra Petrozzi Digital Esoterism (6 and 7 October), the presentation of Vincenzo Susca’s book Tecnomagia. Ecstasies, totems and enchantments in digital culture (5 October at the Ex Pastificio Cerere in San Lorenzo) and the installations by the students of Rufa – Rome University of Fine Arts, who will try their hand at creating artistic proposals of a performative nature but rooted in virtual environments and centred on the theme of technomagia.
Digitalive is part of the Romaeuropa Festival 2023, which, with 90 performances, 300 replicas for over two months of programming, REF2023 investigates the capacity of the arts to cross physical and temporal boundaries, in a journey between the traditional and the contemporary through the plurality of perspectives offered by the sensitivities of over 500 artists from 34 countries around the world.
Digitalive | Romaeuropa Festival 2023, 04 – 08.10.2023
images: (cover 1) Arssalendo, Romaeuropa Festival, Digitalive 2023 (2) None, «Nuovo Mondo», Romaeuropa Festival, Digitalive 2023 (3) Riccardo La Foresta, «Drammophone», Romaeuropa Festival, Digitalive 2023 (4) SPIME.IM, «The Grey Line live», Romaeuropa Festival, Digitalive 2023
