Shelters

What is the place of empathy in a psyco-apathic society? In a time where our inner self is fed by insecurities, threatened by a reality that proposes unrealistic icons and standards, we find ourselves in need to build walls between each other, supposed to shelter us from attacks coming from the lack of humanizing with others. How can we promote the creation of bridges between people coming from different experiences but sharing the same reality?

Framed through a feminist and intersectional lens, Shelters looks at how survival is distributed unevenly across bodies shaped by gender, origin, class, and displacement. It listens to the place where empathy begins to disappear. Where care becomes performance, and belonging only exists through adaptation. Bodies translate themselves endlessly. They soften, adjust, disappear a little at a time. What is asked as integration becomes a quiet choreography of erasure. Something is always left behind: a gesture, a language, a weight of memory. Nothing is neutral in this shedding. Everything is shaped by what a body is allowed to be.

From Southern Italian soil, fragments return—sound, objects, movement—like traces that refuse to become past. Memory does not stay behind; it moves inside the body, stubborn, alive.

The work asks: who gets to remain exposed? who is allowed to be seen without being rewritten?

...

Sometimes when we embrace something new, like a new culture and a new people, we think we have a sort of obligation to free ourselves from what has happened before that moment. We get rid of old habits, old objects, old thoughts, until we almost get rid of ourselves.  

Our history is what keeps us safe, it is a place inside us where we find knowledge and regain humilty, if only we take time to remember it. 

Memory is a vital condition for a brighter life.

Concept: Chiara Fersini (2022)

Choreography & Performance: Chiara Fersini

Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR. 

Winner of the call RiGenerAzioni 2024 of Network Internazionale Danza Puglia.