FABRICA

Paola Bianchi

concept Paola Bianchi in collaboration with Stefano Murgia | choreography and dance Paola Bianchi | sound design Stefano Murgia | lighting design Paolo Pollo Rodighiero | artistic collaboration Roberta Nicolai | costumes PianoB | a project supported by Teatri di Vetro (Roma), Fabrique Autonome des Acteurs (Bataville-Moussey, FR), Caracol Olol Jackson (Vicenza), Teatro Akropolis (Genova), Teatro Galli (Rimini), Città di Ebla/Festival Ipercorpo (Forlì), KOMM TANZ/PASSO NORD progetto residenze Compagnia Abbondanza/Bertoni (Rovereto), Teatro delle Moire/Danae Festival (Milano), AAMOD – Fondazione Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico (Roma), IntercettAzioni – Centro di Residenza Artistica della Lombardia | grazie a i Bata Boys, Martin, Marielaure, Cécile, Louis, Gerard, Asghar, Teo, Oprea, Massimiliano, Elio, Stefano, Gianna, Elisabetta, Carlo, Eugenio, Pietro, Leila, Luciana, Eduardo, Roberta, Sem, Luca, Matteo, Fabio | production PinDoc | with the contribution of MiC and Regione Sicilia

The work is deservedly hateful
Giuseppe Rensi

FABRICA is an excavation in the mnemonic-body archives of workers of different generations met during various artistic residencies. FABRICA is an excavation in the historical archives of factories and companies, an investigation that embraces history and interrogates space, because space determines the bodies that inhabit it and that space determines the choreographic design. FABRICA approaches the bodies that have lived, suffered that space, bodies that carry within them archives of obligatory movements, a score of gestures dictated by work. The physical and physiognomic transformation of human beings, and the transformation of places and spaces tell of a transformation of society, and they do so by touching deep roots, archives that add up and interpenetrate. Far from reproducing the gestures of work in a kind of Chaplinian choreography, FABRICA does not involve compassion. There is assumption by means of deconstruction. So, what does it mean to transform a productive gesture into a gesture that does not produce matter, a gesture that transforms and creates matter, into a gesture that creates something immaterial?
FABRICA is a long journey among places and bodies of work, a journey to create an affective map of those bodies and places.

FABRICA is a series of choreographic actions created during as many artistic residencies. Each residency involves encounters with workers as well as an analysis of the spaces occupied by the work. The materials collected are used to create a specific performance for each place whose title leads back to the place where it is created, placing FABRICA alongside the postcode and the name of the place itself.
FABRICA brings with it pieces of personal and collective stories, archives of gestures, words, sounds and images in a connection that passes through the body on stage.

First steps of the FABRICA project:

FABRICA 57770 [ Bataville ] May/June 2022 creative residency at FAA (Fabrique Autonome des Acteurs) in Bataville-Moussey, a town built in 1931 by Tomáš Bat’a, founder of the Bata shoe factory

FABRICA 57770 [ Bataville ], the first step in a long journey through places and bodies of work, is an excavation in the historical archives of the Bata shoe factory and in the mnemonic-body archives of former workers met during a residency at the FAA in Bataville-Moussey. The work in the factory, the assembly line, the exhausting shifts and the paternalistic relationship between the boss and the workers were the key points of this first plunge into the world of work.

FABRICA 36100 [ Vicenza ] September 2022 creative residency at Caracol Olol Jackson (non-profit organisation, collective project involving the creation of a space in which to create) in Vicenza.
FABRICA 36100 [ Vicenza ] was born from the encounter with the bodies and spaces of Vicenza’s present and industrial past, from interviews, explorations of abandoned sites and factories in full activity. Yesterday’s work in the textile industry, today’s work in the warehouses of logistics, which reformulate the expected results every day according to demand.
Let the scene then become the scene of a crime, that of lives sacrificed at work. Let the dominant discourse with all its ugliness take over the sound space of the scene.

FABRICA 16100 [ Genova ] February/March 2023 creative residency at Teatro Akropolis in Genova

FABRICA 16100 [ Genova ], the third phase of the ELP | bodies of work project, delves into the working class history of Luciana, who worked for ten years on the assembly line at the Tubettificio Ligure – a factory for the production of primary and secondary aluminium, which closed down years ago. Her personal story is interwoven with those of the other workers. Luciana speaks, she narrates, and her words enter the body, enter the space, dividing it into sectors: each sector a state of the body, islands where the body becomes different, where it is different from before. A dramaturgy of the body fragmented, interrupted and connected by shifts in space, a passage from one memory to another. A muscular, tendinous, skeletal narrative, a constant oscillation between micro and macro, between detail and overview.

FABRICA 16100 [ Genova ] has the flavour of a biography, of an individual journey, of a live scene, of a here and now that is no longer history.

FABRICA [ AAMOD ] June/July 2023, Roma
The chained worker’s body. The battered, shackled, measured worker body. The worker body crushed by the steamroller of productivity, of a time that is money. Isolated, infantilised, mutilated. The body as destiny, as a burden to be freed from.
Workers’ bodies in revolt, in uprising. In the name of rejection, of sabotage, for autonomy. The counter-power of those bodies betrayed, denied, cancelled by History.
A corpus of images that claims a concrete movement, a muscular montage that frees its transforming essence against an existing that on the disciplining of those bodies has laid the foundations of a hierarchy now penetrated under the skin.
A body on stage, finally, that embodies the fragments, the tensions, the friction of those bodies, in order to free them, through a living montage, from the paralysis of time and defeat.

ANARCHIVIO FABRICA installation – an environment in which to stop, look, read, talk, listen
Created for the Ambienti section on Teatri di Vetro 17.
What is associated with FABRICA is a dynamic, performative archive, an archive composed of a set of practices that are difficult to harness into schemes, into grids suitable for cataloguing, a collection of hybrid materials with very different signs. It is an anachronistic archive, epochs intermingle with temporal leaps, it is geography rather than history. It is, by its very nature, an anarchic archive. A place in which one makes one’s own way, one’s own order, a place that is only apparently chaotic, a degerarchised place. If the word archive has its origins in the Greek word archè (antiquity, principle, primacy, but also authority, government), the process of dance transmission linked to the ELP project reverses its meaning precisely because of its de-hierarchising nature, because of its openness to a free circulation of materials, to their sharing without being bound to the original, to the principle.
The FABRICA archive contains not only images, but also real testimonies, words and bodies, flesh and blood people with whom we come into contact from time to time. Direct contact with people brings with it a not inconsiderable aspect in the embodiment of these words: empathy. My body becomes a sentimental map of these bodies, of these stories. But can feelings and emotions be catalogued? Can they be archived? Can my body become an archive of feelings? Or do they remain suspended between thought and action? What process of embodiment do they enact? Choreography can create emotion. But can emotion create choreography? Perhaps, but not in my case, I do not know the way. Choreography, the shape of the body, its condition, its strength are concrete elements. They are real states of the body. Emotion beats in the body with forms that move in conforming directions. And the conforming struggles with the formless. What does emotion do then? It shatters, it destroys order, it shatters certainties in order to open up an anarchic archive.
Emotion envelops, the image penetrates.
Emotion scatters, the image fixes./p>

FABRICA 20100 [ Milano ] March/June 2024 creative residency at LachesiLab/Teatro delle Moire, Milano
If capital disciplines the body with labour according to a logic of subordination to capital itself, how do bodies react when it does not produce labour, but demands total adherence to its project, forcing us to support its predatory thinking? How do they act under the constraint of a constant pursuit of the latest trend? How many more selfies must we take? How many more rhetorical phrases will we have to post on social media? How many benches will we have to sit on before we realise that we are the medium for the washing of false consciences?
FABRICA 20100 [ Milano ] is a dystopian story, a hunt for a brand, a place close to desertification – small plants creep into the cracks in the asphalt and cement – a place where people die in the streets without anyone intervening, a place where work is an idea, where green is an idea, a place where dissent is not considered.
Each step of the project may be replicated in other spaces, places, cities.

FABRICA is part of ELP | BODIES OF WORK

ELP | CORPI DEL LAVORO

The WORK, this miserable thing, the WORK. Nightmare of the persecuted! The WORK, this poverty, this anguish, this sort of neurasthenia, this thing that sucks your blood! The WORK, this death that devours you bit by bit, this fear that grips your stomach.
Emanuel Carnevali

The investigation into bodies of work is an ambitious and somewhat endless undertaking. From strictly physical works to intellectual ones, from hated works to loved ones, from salaried works to personal financial risk works, the types are endless as are the reactions to these types. However, one thing is common to all types of work: the body, whether it is almost motionless or in constant motion. The body acts and suffers, the body exists and hardly resists, the body transforms. And that transformation is precisely the focus of the investigation. Gestures repeated over years creep into the folds of muscles, tendons, bones, work marks the soul and body of an entire life. Capital modifies the body with work, educates it, disciplines it according to a logic of subservience to capital itself.
ELP | BODIES OF WORK is generating FABRICA, a series of choreographic actions.

BIBLIOGRAFY
Gabriele Polo I tamburi di Mirafiori – CRIC Editore
Vitaliano Trevisan Works – Einaudi
Luigi di Ruscio Poesie operaie – Ediesse
Frédéric Lordon Capitalismo, desiderio e servitù – DeriveApprodi
Francesco Raparelli Singolarità e istituzioni – Manifesto Libri
Giuseppe Rensi Contro il lavoro – WoM Edizioni
Mark Fisher Desiderio postcapitalista. Le ultime lezioni – minimum fax
Joseph Ponthus Alla linea – Bompiani
Alberto Prunetti 108 metri. The new working class hero – Editori Laterza
Alberto Prunetti Non è un pranzo di gala. Indagine sulla letteratura working class – minimum fax
Pietro Pierotti, Marco Revelli FIAT autunno 80. Per non dimenticare. Immagini e documenti di una lotta operaia – CRIC Editore
Simone Weil La condizione operaia – Arnoldo Mondadori Editore
Luisa Carnés Tea rooms. Operaie della ristorazione – Edizioni Alegre
David Graeber Bullshit jobs. Le professioni inutili che rendono ricco chi le svolge e povero chi fa un lavoro vero – Garzanti
Lucia Tozzi L’invenzione di Milano: culto della comunicazione e politiche urbane – Cronopio

ELP progetto di creazione

concept concept Paola Bianchi |
artists Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo, Paolo Pollo Rodighiero, Nicola Amato, Marta Bichisao, Stefano Murgia, Paola Bianchi, ten young dancers and about 450 other people |
science advisory board Laura Gemini, Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Annapaola Lovisolo, Alessandro Pontremoli
tutor Roberta Nicolai, Raimondo Guarino |
outside perspective Ivan Fantini |
artistic residencies L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora di Mondaino | La Corte Ospitale ::: Centro di Residenza della Regione Emilia-Romagna; Centro di Residenza della Toscana (Armunia Rosignano – CapoTrave/Kilowatt Sansepolcro); Teatro Felix Guattari | Masque Teatro; CID Centro Internazionale della Danza di Rovereto; Santarcangelo Festival; Teatro G. Villa, San Clemente – Città Teatro; Lavanderia a Vapore
project realised with the contribution of ResiDance XL – an action of Rete Anticorpi XL – Network Giovane Danza D’autore, coordinated by L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora di Mondaino |
production PinDoc |
a coproduction Agar, Teatri di Vetro, Teatro Akropolis |
with the support of L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora | La Corte Ospitale – Centro di Residenza Emilia Romagna
with the contribution of Mic and Regione Sicilia

In 2019 the ELP project is winner of the Call for Choreographic Residencies Lavanderia a Vapore.
In 2020 it is winner of the Rete Critica 9 and ¾ Award.

Ethos as a “way of being”, the “how”.
Logos, from the Indo-European root leg, meaning “to pick up”, meant here both as word and listening.
Pathos, the emotional power.
These three bodiless entities are the aesthetics (through senses) of a project focused on the body as absolute protagonist even in its own absence.

ELP is an articulated research project linked to an in-depth investigation of the body, the relationships between bodies and the cultural imaginaries of which bodies are repositories.
ELP investigates the relationship between the descriptive word and dance through the audio transmission of archives of postures created from images. The descriptive word here means a word that only describes postures and movements without describing emotions.
Precisely because of the precision of the description of movement and the absence of emotion, this same word can and “must” in turn create emotion.

The project has so far seen the contribution and participation in its realisation of approximately 450 people, including professionals, children, citizens, blind people, people with Parkinson’s disease, students, migrants and refugees; it has been supported by the main organisations involved in contemporary dance and has so far seen the realisation of several shows and performances.

How to create a choreography without a body to be imbibed by the body of the listener? What does the verbal description of a choreographic piece trigger into the body of the listener? And what moves would it generate when embodied?
These were the first questions that started the research in 2018.
I discern between “imbibe” (introject, subsume) and “embody” (becoming it, turn it into flesh) the first being an imaginative process which doesn’t call for an actual movement in the body of the listener whereas the other is the physical action of performing.
What I’ve learned from my experiences so far is that even the utmost accurate and detailed description of a posture or a movement is always interpreted in a very subjective and individual way, both whenever imbibed and embodied.
The act of listening to the description of a movement can lead to envision your own body moving via a sort of muscular imagination (I become the body that is being depicted, thanks to my imagination its movements become my movements).
The process of embodying the description of a movement gives birth to a unique interpretation according to the single listening skills as well as to the specifics and potentials of the body of the subject and triggers the individual creativity to research the characteristics of the movement without having a physical template to emulate. By removing the body of the choreographer, the model, every single body develops its own system.

A short sequence of descriptive words:

I am standing – my legs are slightly separated from each other, my feet parallel – my left leg is stretched out, my right leg is slightly bent – my left arm is bent to my side with the elbow down, my wrist is flexed, my hand is relaxed – my right hand is resting on my left hand, my right shoulder is slightly raised – my head is turned to the right.
This simple posture is interpreted in as many ways as the people who embody it but the extreme similarities of the various postures denote an interesting continuity between the transmission/enaction of the individual experiences of the bodies at play; a scheme that by removing the “choreographer body” as a template to be replicated paradoxically reinforce its influence and disclose the inherent meaning of the movement.

In order to examine the topic from different perspectives the project ELP will benefit from the scientific contributions by communication sociologists Laura Gemini and Giovanni Boccia Artieri, psychologist Annapaola Lovisolo and dance historian Alessandro Pontremoli.

The ELP project has now developed into the following archives/constellations:

WESTERN MEMORIES
OTHER MEMORIES
BODIES OF THE PROTEST
SHATTERED ARCHIVES is a further development of the ELP project
BODIES OF WORK
RECLUSE BODIES