A futura memoria is a community project intertwining dance, memory and relationship, transforming the body into a living archive of experiences, roots and shared imaginaries. Born from Zerogrammi’s artistic and relational research, the project forms part of a long-term exploration of the relationship between contemporary creation, places and communities, placing the body at the centre as a site of knowledge, encounter and transformation.

For years, the company has explored themes connected to individual and collective memory, belonging, identity, and the traces that time leaves in people and places. From this perspective, memory is not understood as a static archive of facts and recollections, but as a living, mobile material continuously rewritten through experience. Every body holds an invisible geography made of encounters, absences, desires, inheritances and transformations. A futura memoria emerges from the need to give form to this geography, turning it into a shared experience.

The project’s poetic landscape moves between nostalgia and desire, loss and belonging, dream and reality. The exile evoked in its title is not only geographical, but also inner: a universal condition concerning our relationship with time, with our origins, with what has been and with what has yet to find fulfilment. It is in the suspended space between memory and the future that the project finds a generative possibility, where the fragility of remembrance can become gesture, presence and relationship.

A futura memoria develops through participatory processes built in dialogue with the contexts that host it. Each activation begins with a preliminary phase of listening and co-design alongside organisations, associations, cultural institutions, informal groups and local communities, in order to define aims, participants, working methods and forms of presentation consistent with the specific character of each place.

At the heart of the project are experiential workshops in which dance and movement become tools for listening, relationship and storytelling. Through accessible body-based practices, observation exercises, the gathering of memories, improvisation and collective composition, participants are accompanied in recognising and sharing fragments of their personal histories. Gradually, these traces become a shared vocabulary of images, gestures, stories and performative actions.

The process does not seek merely to produce a final performance, but to create a temporary space of encounter in which people can recognise themselves as bearers of memory and imagination. Artistic practice thus becomes an occasion for proximity and dialogue, capable of activating new connections among individuals, generations and communities.

The project maintains a strong continuity with Zerogrammi’s artistic creations, sharing their themes, questions and poetic trajectories. The communities involved are not invited to observe a work from the outside, but to enter into a relationship with it, moving through its materials and contributing to the construction of new meanings.

Each process is therefore an autonomous form of cultural activation which, while remaining in dialogue with the company’s productions, generates original and unrepeatable experiences.

Depending on the context, A futura memoria can take different forms: intergenerational workshops, participatory community programmes, urban journeys, site-sensitive practices, memory-gathering initiatives, performative presentations, relational installations, or processes accompanying audiences in their experience of the works.

Its open structure allows the project to adapt to widely differing social, cultural and territorial contexts, while preserving the poetic core that animates it.

Over the years, the project has generated numerous experiences in Italy and abroad, including Interconnessioni in Sardinia, Walzen in Turin and Collegno, the international project Be Part OF in Iceland, and Danzando memorie sul mare in Pesaro. Each stage has helped enrich an evolving practice, confirming art’s capacity to create spaces of relationship in which individual memories can become shared heritage and new ways of imagining the future.