The work of Zerogrammi in the 2025–2027 triennium engages with themes that have gradually become central to our research: memory, archive, body.
 
We are interested in observing how the past continues to act within the present. Archives — documents, images, testimonies — are not materials to be preserved, but devices to be reactivated. When they enter into dialogue with choreographic practice, they cease to be simple traces and become working material: living archives, capable of generating new forms of experience.
 
Dance is one of the ways through which this material can be explored. The body is not only an expressive instrument: it is a space where time settles, where individual experiences and collective histories continue to leave their marks. Every gesture carries traces in the body, fragments of time that begin to move again.
 
In this sense every body is also a political body, because it carries within itself the stratifications of its time. The artistic act itself holds a political dimension in the most fundamental sense of the term: it concerns the way bodies inhabit a shared space, expose themselves to the gaze of others, and create forms of relation.
 
The stage becomes a place where these relations can be observed, questioned and transformed. The dancing body does not simply represent something: it acts, takes a position, and opens a space of possibility.
 
But dance is never an isolated gesture.
To exist, it needs a gaze that receives it.
 
It is in the space that emerges between the one who dances and the one who watches that an individual gesture becomes a collective act. In that moment dance ceases to be only a performance and becomes a shared experience.
 
When the spectator recognises themselves as part of this common space, a sense of belonging appears. Theatre returns to being, in its most essential sense, a place of the polis: a space where a community gathers to observe itself.
 
Dance does not only produce images or emotions.
It produces relations.
 
Within these relations one may glimpse, even if only for a moment, the possibility of a form of democracy of the body.
 
This research path coincides with an important moment for the company: the twenty-fifth anniversary of Zerogrammi. Rather than an anniversary to celebrate, we see it as an opportunity to reflect on the work developed over time and on the archives — both material and immaterial — that have accumulated through the years: performances, practices, collaborations, relationships.
 
A heritage that continues to live within the archive-bodies of those who have passed through these years of work.
 
The creations of this triennium move precisely within this space: between memory and the present, between document and gesture, between archive and body. A research that explores the relationship between body memory and gesture document, between what remains and what continues to transform through movement.

Stefano Mazzotta