BODIES IN TENSION (2026)

Bodies in Tension was a participatory live performance investigating the migrant body as a site of negotiation, interdependency, vulnerability, and collective agency within public space.

The artist’s body is extended through elastic straps worn on the limbs, reaching into the surrounding public space. Passersby are invited to take the straps and collectively negotiate the performer's movements, transforming spectators into active participants. Every gesture, enacted or suspended in its potentiality, emerges through shared tension, cooperation, hesitation, and care, redistributing agency, responsibility, and the dynamics of control.

Presented across several locations in Venice over the course of a single day, the performance unfolds through a series of brief interventions that move across the city's streets, bridges, and squares. Each intervention functions as a social choreography, activating a distinct relational poetics between bodies, space, and collective action. The work asks: Which invisible forces shape migration, intimacy and togetherness? When do regulations on movement or decency function as support, and when do they become instruments of control and oppression?

The evening iteration responds to Venice’s municipal codes on public dress and bodily exposure, as well as Italian Penal Code articles 726 and 527 on acts contrary to public decency and obscene acts in public, turning the law into the work’s point of tension. It questions how legal regulations, visibility, and collective freedom are negotiated in the city’s public space.

Bodies in Tension was presented within PERFORMATICA 2026: Corpus Migrante, an independent performance festival in Venice curated by Hector Canonge and organized by INPA, the International Network of Performance Art, parallely to the 61st La Biennale di Venezia.

+ Post photo by Hector Canonge.