The project originates from a reflection on the profound bond between memory and space. The places we move through — real, imagined, lived, or lost — become part of our inner structure, preserving 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 emotional 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 engages with philosophical and literary references exploring themes of memory, dwelling, and the relationship between the individual and the inner landscape. Time is observed not as a linear succession, but as suspended matter made of returns, stratifications, nostalgia, and missed possibilities.

Within this poetic landscape, the dancing body becomes an instrument of traversal and inquiry, capable of bringing invisible worlds, submerged images, and forgotten relationships back to light.

DRAMATURGICAL NOTES

Our narrative nature is both the foundation and the result of a profound relationship with the passing of time and with the proliferation of stories whose very substance and meaning lie in the constant dualism between past and future, nostalgia and desire. Within this relationship — predominantly emotional and often irrational — our bond with geography plays a fundamental role: spatial memory, with its ordered and pragmatic structure, becomes the glue for otherwise elusive recollections that bind us to people, things, feelings, and everything that composes the map of our inner journey.

“The order of places preserves the order of things.”
— Cicero

The environment becomes a place of life, the stage of one’s own story upon which the memory of oneself in relation to the world is imprinted. From that moment onward, we are no longer capable of thinking of ourselves without also thinking of the spaces that host our experiences: the roots of the places we inhabit, that we call home, and with them, hopefully, the feelings of safety, shelter, and intimacy they carry, together with the faces of those who once moved through them.

“Every human being is a remembering. And therefore, in every human being, remembering is the eternal memory of the eternal — where eternal are both the remembered things and the one who remembers.”
— Emanuele Severino

Thus emerge the places of memory, real and concrete or imagined and symbolic: they may possess the solidity of stone or the slipperiness of the abyss; they may be wrapped in darkness or shine with divine light; they may imprison the mind or open entire horizons. The univocal meaning of the impregnable acropolis beloved by Stoic tradition or of Teresa of Ávila’s inner castle fractures in modernity and survives in Gustave Flaubert only by sharing its sovereignty with the prosaic image of the back room — already invoked by Michel de Montaigne to allude to the inner 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 among the “useless ruins” of Eugenio Montale, or contemplate the “inner sky” glimpsed by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Yet no depth sounding is so desolate as to renounce some form of spatiality. Even emptiness is part of the soul’s furnishing.

“The soul loves spaces.”
— L. Sozzi

These COMMOSSE GEOGRAFIE are the landscapes appearing on the horizon along the slow procession of existence: the stopping places that have marked — or will mark — choices, turning points, renunciations, achievements, loves, 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 established between the dancing body and these MOVED (commosse, from the Latin commovēre, “to set in motion”) inner GEOGRAPHIES is rooted in the quality and depth of time: not a completed and finalized time, but a suspended time that becomes memory, interrogation, exploration, research, doubt — a time that creates roots, a nonlinear time of recurrences and returns.

Into it flow luminous vastnesses, the indissoluble connection with the first face of the world, the profile of a landscape we continue to seek along the paths of life, even where those features first appeared and took shape, in a spiral movement in which the closer we draw to the heart of things, the further we seem to move away from them. From here also emerges the nostalgic relationship with places, and with the unlived, with possible selves and alternative space-times. (A. Spinelli)

The landscapes danced within COMMOSSE GEOGRAFIE are at once physical landscapes and landscapes of the mind: perceptions and visions, streets, buildings, monuments, white stone, open and enclosed spaces, ruins and non-places, parks and gardens, rivers and canals, generative seas, inside and outside the city, the far and the near reversing themselves. Each is bound to emotions, memories, and meanings that are ours — that make us who we are — and that at the same time we share, through infinite shades of experience, with the lives of others.

Dance becomes geography: it substantiates its own presence within space and memory, multiplies its directions, nourishes space and is nourished by it in return, revealing the illusion of the linearity of time and of the predominance of the subject over things.

From this immersive process emerges courageously a world forever new — reinvented, relived, retraced, and redanced each time as though experienced through the gaze of a first encounter — a world resurfacing from silence and inner invisibility to become living matter, present substance, the fabric of a new and deeply moved topography of life.