Join the Symposium ‘One more step Beyond Borders’ in Bologna

The Symposium One More Step Beyond Borders aims to explore the performative ways through which we can overcome boundaries, whether conceptual or material, and to experience those territories of contact and metamorphosis that lie beyond them. Overcoming a limit is understood as a brave possibility, as a challenge, as a manifesto for an existence that cannot be confined to a specific geometry and identity; but also as the desire to meet otherness and let it transform us, or even as a way to sabotage classifications and hierarchies.

The goal of the Symposium is to reflect on Performative Arts – both theoretically and practically – as a tool to take action in our reality, to deconstruct its limits and structures, but also to open it to contamination between disciplines and traditions from different times and geographies. In fact, the Symposium will explore the encounter between arts, activism, and education as a modality of resistance to personal and cultural divisions as well as a pathway to break down barriers and build bridges between distant bodies and worlds. Art and activism become practices to jump over walls and bring them down, that is, to fight social and cultural isolation, but also to subvert the divide between disciplines, to transcend distances between individuals and cultures and thereby reconstruct a collective dimension. 

The Symposium aims to generate a reflection capable of prompting artists and cultural operators to become a Mauerspringer: a wall-jumper – a term, now well known in the German language, to designate those who climbed over the Berlin Wall in secret.  In a world in which wars and social divisions now seem to limit our imagination, the urge is to take action through art, to take ‘One More Step Beyond Borders’.

Throughout the Symposium, we will present some key steps of the Beyond Borders project carried out in Italy and abroad – India, USA, Senegal, Tunisia – highlighting some of the outcomes achieved through video works, documentaries, web performances, practical workshops and master classes.

Moreover, there will be artists and researchers from different parts of the world – Italy, Mexico, Venezuela, Tunisia – who will discuss the topic of ‘Overcoming Borders’ through performing arts, exploring the relationship between art, society and politics. 

From Indian dance traditions and Nagaland tribal songs as an example of unity and tolerance across diversity, to artistic innovation and experimentation as a way of breaking down boundaries between different disciplines. 

From dramaturgy creation as a vehicle of political ‘activism’ in war scenarios, such as Palestine, to the representation of vulnerabilities of the human psyche and the enabling of listening processes through theatre. From training as a tool to internationalise the careers of young Italian artists, to co-creation paths shared with artists from different parts of the world to set up co-production processes and international touring.