people: Carla Collevecchio

Um…Crits is an interdisciplinary forum around ongoing artistic research in its broadest sense, often with invited guests. For this session we have invited Carla Collevecchio, lecture at Umeå School of Architecture 

The SVP project Performative Bodies investigates the role of the moving body as a critical mediator in the synthesis of the arts. Through rigorous archival research, it constructs a transhistorical web of interconnected events, mapping ideas, fragments, individuals, movements, theories, and documents that have traversed time and space. This process not only flattens historical narratives but also uncovers new associations when viewed through a contemporary lens. Building upon this mapped network, a selection of these fragments is recontextualized and layered into a performative experiment. A series of rehearsals will explore the emergence of a novel, transdisciplinary methodology, retracing the intersections of the arts through the body as a situated, spatial, and material event. 

Carla Collevecchio’s research project ‘Performative Bodies’ traces influences between the Bauhaus Theatre Workshop by Oskar Schlemmer in Germany and the Ballet Suedois by Rolf de Mare in Paris, to investigate how the paradigm of body, movement and space influenced the historical development of performative arts and dance in Sweden.

Without the body there is no space, nor architecture to be perceived. This assumption is as obvious as it is radical. Space influences movements and behaviors, so it must be designed with fully awareness of its consequences and impact on living. What is the effect that space can have on body movement? How can body movement affect the creation of space itself? What are the mechanisms to choreograph this inseparable relation between body and space?

The aim of this investigation is to map and articulate historical cases that radicalized this relation between body, movement and space as a synthesis of arts, looking closer at the performative art scene in Sweden, using the Bauhaus Stage Workshop and Ballet Suedois as the references for experimentation and materialization. By constructing a new genealogy, this research will provide new clues about the role of performance as a spatial practice.

The research will include contemporary performance and its relationship to architectural space, for example LIB with choreography by Alexander Ekman, Staatsballet Berlin, 2019.

The Curatorial Research group meets regularly to discuss curating contemporary art as research process and as a form of knowledge production. This new partnership with Bildmuseet is chaired by curator Anca Rujoiu who is currently undertaking doctoral research in the Curatorial Program at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. The group brings together curators and curatorial researchers focusing on critical frameworks for curatorial practice, new curatorial methodologies, and situating curatorial knowledge in the international field.