If Body is a public program of visual and performing arts, focusing on the body as an artistic language and a transformative learning methodology based on experiential involvement.

If Body 2024 is born out of an urge to react to the risk of annihilation generated by violence, forms of oppression, and the failures of so-called civilization. In this scenario of material and symbolic destruction, which threatens the existence of communal life as well as relational experiences in the present, the body becomes a territory of constant hardship, lacerated by pain and profound unease.

The subtitle of the program, Living Fragments, picks up on the words of Lebanese poet and artist Etel Adnan who, in a 1990 letter to her friend, the writer Fawwaz Traboulsi, reflects on the difficulties in imagining an individual or collective future. She writes: “I tell myself that we are terrorists, not terrorists in the political and ordinary sense of the word, but because we carry inside of our bodies – like explosives – all the deep troubles that befall our countries (…) We are the scribes of a scattered self, living fragments, as if the parts of the self were writing down the bits and ends of a perception never complete.”

Each project presented in the program investigates the value of personal experience, the tensions between history and memory, the ideologically manipulative nature of grand narratives, as well as epistemic violence and systems of codification. These inquiries experiment with collective practice and explore art as a potential vehicle to open up spaces for sharing and collaboration, critical thinking and action.

The invited artists draw from and employ fragments as the building blocks of alternative forms of communication and archiving, mutual learning practices, and knowledge production: subversions that are geared towards unmasking as well as undoing the violent and inadequate hegemonies intent on perpetually devouring the seeds of plurality and possibility. Temporal and spatial hierarchies are questioned and rearranged, brought closer to affect, in an effort to reclaim control of knowledge, of the economic and the political, as well as over sensory perception, on the part of the bodies that experience it.

If Body is organized by APS LOCALES, promoted by Roma Capitale – Assessorato alla Cultura, is the winner of the two-year Public Notice “Estate Romana 2023-2024” curated by the Dipartimento Attività Culturali, and is realized in collaboration with SIAE.