Credits

site-specific performative installation / workshop

concept and direction
Titta C. Raccagni and Barbara Stimoli

main performers
Barbara Stimoli, Titta C. Raccagni, Elena Fontana Paganini, Camilla Isola

Administration
Nexus Factory

with the support of MiC, Emilia-Romagna Region, Municipality of Bologna

with residency support from theworkroom (Fattoria Vittadini/ Fondazione Milano), Stazione di Topolò/PostajaTopolove, BASE Milano

in collaboration with Dialoghi Residenze delle arti performative a Villa Manin, curated by CSS Teatro stabile di innovazione del Friuli Venezia Giulia 2021/22

Duration
40 minutes

Pleasure Rocks explores a material relationship between the organic and the inorganic, the human and the non-human. The research unfolds without drawing a distinction between human beings and nature: through the time of exploration and perception, through a space of care and re-connection, it generates a sympoietic alliance of bodies, an intra-action between humans and rocks.

The title is a play on words that suggests the importance of re-signifying pleasure, affirming its political and transformative value. The idea of pleasure in Pleasure Rocks evolved throughout the research process. The rock shifted from object to subject, body, and companion in exploration, transforming the initial vision into an experimentation on/with matter.

The rock gradually shaped the very time of the experience. It is an expanded, geological time, one that opens up different possibilities of pleasure, in a state of listening that heightens the senses and reconnects us to the matter we are, the matter in which we are immersed and with which we “intra-act”.

Pleasure Rocks raises questions about the necessary and urgent shift away from an anthropocentric view of the world: just as with animals and plants, we also need to rethink our way of being with minerals and the formation of territories, from a perspective that is not solely devoted to exploitation and predation, but to knowledge and relationship.

Pleasure Rocks is a collaboration between the artistic duo Titta C. Raccagni and Barbara Stimoli, and the visual artist Alessia Bernardini.

Thanks to the interaction between different artistic paths and languages, the Pleasure Rocks research has generated, over the years, a publication, an exhibition, a workshop, a video installation, and a land-specific performative installation.