A choreographic journey through the Italian State Archives, a project of creation, research, and archival heritage enhancement curated by Zerogrammi and Arearea

INTRODUCTION

State Archives are places where time does not pass: it settles.

Papers, registers, maps, and administrative acts preserve what once needed to be said, signed, classified.

“Filed for the record.”

“Nothing further to add.”

Estremo Remoto was born as a choreographic and performative project investigating the relationship between institutional memory and embodied memory, between what has been archived and what continues to act in the present.

In this specific form, the project unfolds as a widespread traversal of the Italian State Archives, understood as living spaces, temporal thresholds, and places of creation.

ARTISTIC CONCEPT

Estremo Remoto works with what is distant in time yet still active: forgotten documents, anonymous signatures, precise dates, inventories.

“General register, year…”

“Sheet no. …”

Dance enters the archive not to illustrate, but to reactivate.

The body becomes an instrument of listening, a living index, a marginal note.

The work investigates the relationship between: body and document, archive and presence, preservation and disappearance.

DRAMATURGICAL NOTES: CHOREOGRAPHIC RESEARCH WITHIN THE ARCHIVES

Estremo Remoto originates from an attraction to the subtle texture of human memory preserved within archival documents. It is not the great historical events that interest us, but rather minimal stories, marginal details, the small fragments that time has left behind. Ultimately, our humanity is made of narration, of what we tell and what we forget.

The choreographic act thus becomes a way of rediscovering those forgotten fragments, of giving body to narratives buried within bureaucratic formulas, administrative acts, and gestures carefully recorded and then forgotten.

The choreographer and performers search the archives for a kind of second skin of history, made not of famous names but of ordinary people, of moments registered and then filed away. Every signature, every date, every marginal annotation becomes an invitation to imagine, reconstruct, and dance what has been lost.

In this sense, the archive is not merely a place of preservation, but a terrain of creation. It is a space in which choreography becomes an act of listening, poetic recovery, and embodied narration. The body becomes a sensitive archivist, leafing through not only documents but also absences, gaps, and silences.

The dramaturgical notes of Estremo Remoto are therefore an invitation to see the archive as a place where the human resurfaces through gesture. It is a call to remember that our collective history is made of small narratives, marginal details, and forgotten traces that, through dance, may begin to speak again.