Fellows in Residence

Photo Bettina Stoess

Anna Huber – Choreographer – Switzerland

Horizons

Anna Huber will pursue transdisciplinary research from multiple perspectives with promising apparent counter-poles: SKIN, simultaneously the closest boundary and sensitive inter-connection to the environment, touching and connecting inside and outside; and the fascinating phenomenon of the HORIZON, the periphery of our altering visual field, expanding awareness to broader perspectives. The multidimensional potential of these topics engages Anna’s interest in paradoxes and transformation.

Salomé Lamas – Filmmaker/Visual Artist – Portugal

Salomé Lamas will work on three projects: Ouro e Cinza, a feature film where, in a kind of redemption exercise, two women go beyond their limits in order to free themselves of their comfortable, yet suffocating, lives; Pantheras, a documentary film where the response to Coronavirus is an opportunity for reform; and Gaia, an interactive audiovisual experience that acknowledges social and ecological interdependence in an apocalyptic crisis.

Michel Sidoroff – Script Writer – France

Prima vox, script

Does the study of time reversal protect lovers against the entropy of desire? A physicist and a poet meet at the crossroads of their explorations. Between action and dream, the poet designs a language. In an acoustic mirror, the physicist reverses the time of a wave's course: she imagines a medical use for this discovery, but military interests interfere. Together, they will draw from their beliefs the strength to act and preserve the first instant's unaltered note.

Laura Di Bianco (Visual Arts-Scholarship) – Assistant Professor of Italian Studies, Johns Hopkins University – Italy/United States

Crumbling Beauty: Italian Cinema of the Anthropocene

Laura Di Bianco’s book project Crumbling Beauty traces a genealogy of Italian ecocinema from the silent era to the present. Placing the relationship between humans, nonhumans, and the environment at its core, ecocinema takes an earth-centered approach rather than an anthropocentric one, offering a bioegalitarian view of the world while denying human moral preeminence. The project explores how film can help us come to terms with ecological crises and foster a culture of care and change.

Daniel Ferrer (Literature-Scholarship) – Director of Research Emeritus at the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (École Normale Supérieure-CNRS) – France

A logic of creative decisions

Daniel Ferrer will try to show how the interpretation of the working documents of writers and artists (notes, drafts, sketches, scenarios, storyboards) allows for a reconstruction of their creative processes, taking form in a chain of situated decisions to aid in understanding the logic of decision making.

Photo Dorin Mihai

Enrico Piergiacomi (Philosophy) – Postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Trento – Italy

Theatresophy: the interpretation of theatre and the actor in ancient philosophy (part 1)

Enrico Piergiacomi will be writing a first book based on Teatrosophy, a philosophical popularization project that since November 2014 has been investigating how ancient philosophers interpreted theater and the art of acting. This preliminary investigation will start from the so-called “Presocratics” and will end with Plato/the first Platonists. In parallel to this research activity, Piergiacomi will also reflect on how to transform the material into some lecture-performances.

Nick Brooke – Composer – United Kingdom/United States – Aaron Copland Bogliasco Special Fellow in Music

12 Transcendental Etudes

12 Transcendental Etudes weaves together sound collages with physical theater. Performers imitate a maquette of recordings, creating a gestural vocabulary in lock-step with samples. The piece riffs on etudes, piano pieces intended for learners, but sometimes only playable by virtuosi, and looks at listeners’ ability to transcend the technologies—microphones and ubiquitous recordings—that envelop them, while using familiar pop and recorded sources.

Photo Terekas

Žibuoklė Martinaitytė – Composer – Lithuania/United States

Hadal Zone

Žibuoklė Martinaitytė will be working on an hour-long piece, Hadal Zone [in search of depths....], blending the lowest range instruments such as tuba, contrabass and bass clarinet with pre-recorded electronics. It is an immersive sonic journey through various gradations of darkness – low frequencies and the resulting overtones as a metaphor for descending into the depths of the ocean. The Hadal zone, named after the realm of Hades – the underworld in Greek mythology – is found in waters below 6,000 meters.

Nicole Sigal – Novelist, Playwright – France

Old Up, a play

Aline, La Motarde, Marthe, L’Intello and Casanova are between 70 and 80 years old but have adolescent libidos. They are wasting away in the same “Repotel” retirement home: tasteless food, lamentable treatment, infantilization, and constant restrictions in the name of safety. After telling each other the sad stories of their arrivals at this establishment against their wills, they form a resistance. It is decided: our happy friends will not live another day in this place for the dying...

Alice Miceli – Visual Artist – Brazil/Italy

Patterns of Contamination

This project is a research for a new body of work that will create photographic visualization systems for the contamination patterns of epidemic diseases, especially looking into the origins of HIV and AIDS and their early propagation in Central Africa.