The project emerges from a reflection on the profound bond between memory and space. The places we move through—real, imagined, lived in or lost—become part of our inner structure, holding emotional traces that continue to act over time.

The geographies of Commosse Geografie belong not only to the physical landscape, but also to the symbolic and affective dimension of existence. Houses, cities, streets, gardens, ruins, seas, rooms and non-places coexist as fragments of an emotional topography continuously rewritten by memory and experience.

The project enters into dialogue with philosophical and literary references exploring memory, dwelling and the relationship between the individual and the inner landscape. Time is observed not as a linear succession, but as suspended material made of returns, layers, nostalgia and missed possibilities.

Within this poetic landscape, the dancing body becomes a tool for passage and inquiry, capable of bringing invisible worlds, submerged images and forgotten relationships back to light.

DRAMATURGICAL NOTES

Our narrative nature is both foundation and result of a profound relationship with the passing of time and with the proliferation of stories, whose material and reason for existing lie in the constant duality between past and future, nostalgia and desire. Within this relationship—predominantly emotional and often irrational—our bond with our own geographies plays a fundamental role. Spatial memory, with its ordered and pragmatic structure, is the glue that holds together otherwise fleeting memories, binding us to people, things, feelings, and everything that makes up the map of our inner journey.

The order of places will preserve the order of things.

Cicero

The environment becomes a place of life, the setting of one’s own story, where the memory of oneself in relation to the world is impressed. From that moment on, we are no longer able to think of ourselves without thinking of the space that holds our experiences: the roots of the places we inhabit and call home, and with them, hopefully, the feeling of safety, shelter and intimacy they bring, together with the faces of the people who have passed through them.

Every human being is remembrance. And therefore, in every person, their remembering is their eternal memory of eternal things—where eternal are both the things remembered and the one who remembers.

Emanuele Severino

Thus the places of memory come into being. Real and concrete, or imaginary and symbolic, they may possess the solidity of stone or the slipperiness of an abyss; they may be wrapped in darkness or shine with divine light; they may imprison the mind or open up entire horizons.

The univocal meaning of the impregnable acropolis dear to the Stoic tradition, or of Teresa of Ávila’s inner castle, is fractured in modernity and survives in Flaubert only by sharing its sovereignty with the prosaic image of the back room—the image Montaigne had already used to evoke the free zone each person preserves within themselves. In the vertical journey into one’s own abyss, one may arrive at the ambiguous “splendid retreat” of Manzoni’s Gertrude, stumble over Montale’s “useless rubble”, or contemplate the “inner sky” glimpsed by Schelling.

Yet no inner sounding is so desolate as to renounce some form of spatiality. Even emptiness is part of the soul’s furnishings.

The soul loves spaces.

L. Sozzi

These COMMOSSE GEOGRAFIE—“moving geographies”, from the Latin commovēre, “to set in motion”—are the landscapes that stand on the horizon along the slow procession of existence: the way stations that have marked, or will mark, choices, turning points, renunciations, achievements, loves and desires for return. They are narrow, winding alleys or immense seas whose soul invites us to make soul with the soul of the world (James Hillman).

The dialogue between the dancing body and these inner COMMOSSE GEOGRAFIE is a bond rooted in the quality and depth of time: not time that has passed and come to an end, but suspended time becoming memory—questioning, exploration, research and doubt; a time that creates roots, a non-linear time of recurrences and returns.

Into it flow luminous vastnesses, the indissoluble bond with the world’s first face, the outline of a landscape we continue to seek along life’s paths, even where those features first took form and appeared. It is a spiral movement in which the closer we come to the heart of things, the further away we move from it. From this also arises our nostalgic relationship with places, and with the unlived, with possible selves and alternative space-times. (A. Spinelli)

The landscapes danced in COMMOSSE GEOGRAFIE are at once physical and mental landscapes: perceptions and visions; streets, buildings, monuments and white stone; open and enclosed spaces, ruins and non-places, parks and gardens, rivers and canals, generative seas; the inside and outside of cities; the distant and the near, reversing one another. Each is bound to emotions, memories and senses that are our own, making us who we are and, at the same time, shared—though in an infinite dialogue of nuances—with the lived experience of others.

Dance becomes geography. It grounds its presence in space and memory, multiplies its directions, nourishes space and is nourished by it in turn, revealing the illusion of time’s linearity and of the subject’s dominance over things. From this process of immersion, an unprecedented world emerges courageously: each time reinvented, relived, retraced and redanced as though encountered through a first gaze. A world re-emerging from silence and inner invisibility to become living, present material—the substance of a new, moving topography of life.