Melisa Zulberti is director, stage designer, choreographer and visual artist. She works in a wide variety of artistic disciplines (performing arts, visual arts, industrial design, and technology).
Her work has received national and international recognition. Her projects and research is oriented towards the interconnection between different languages and aesthetics. Nowadays, Melisa is one the the most renowned artists in the contemporary arts field and she works in an interdisciplinary way, investigating the interconnection of different artistic languages such as dance, performance, technology, architecture and visual arts.
She is the artista selected by the international call of the Biennale di danza di Venezia, to have a premiere in the 2024 edition. The Biennale defines the artists it selects as alchemists of movement. They say that the artists’ work is driven by an insatiable curiosity to explore and experiment, both in process and interpretation; through improvisation, soma-sensory installation, radical minimalism or in surprising departures from form and context.
VIDEO PRESENTATION OF THE ARTIST
WORKS:
*All works present different possibilities and alternatives for being presented (italian style, black box, site-specific in unconventional spaces, installation, museums, galleries, outdoors)
OVER ITSELF
Over Itself is a multidisciplinary project that stems from a study into systems of continuous transportation to create a sculptural composition that inhabits movement. A machine or a mechanism in which the bodies inquire into the possibility of the constant and the direction of a trajectory. In each rotation, a rupture of the universe is both a beginning and an ending. Automatized bodies investigate the rhythm and direction of a trajectory, in an uninterrupted search for the unveiling of the occult. Here, a machine is taken as an element that condenses the different aspects of existing within a city. Its condition and utility. With such, we seek to investigate and create an environment suspended in metaphor alongside the bodies, to install new poetics and realities. At the same time, the object itself, devoid of performers, begs the question: Is this the starting point of a construction, a reparation, a transformation? The moment where everything could be.
Audiovisual short film in site specific format
THE BODIES CONTINUITY
This interdisciplinary proposal touches upon concepts such as weight, fragility, suspension, and duplication. Through investigating physical virtuosity, the performer avigates notions of living sculptures. By updating it’s imaginary, it shuffles the various possibilities of adding new meanings to the final image composition. This installation project playfully addresses the multiplicity of forms and bodies, bringing a sense of infinity to the scene, in analogy with the infinity of time. The continuity of bodies is a project that questions the new forms of sensorial, spatial, and corporal community. Bodies like particles investigating the possibility of the constant. Starting from the individual power, it searches to magnetize other bodies affected by the resonance and forming a shared sensitivity in constant expansion and compression. The work proposes bodies as magnetic territories, offering a geography in constant construction. Bodies as magnetic territories. Starting from the premise that a body is a latent energy that reverses reality, creates itself, vanishes, builds, and de-builds itself, its dimensions can fluctuate, its surface can evoke, move or challenge perception. The body is a social fabric that weaves territories in its interaction with others. It establishes links, limits, analogies, empathies, and segmentations. It reclaims and resists itself. Several bodies in unison embody strangeness or blend into a performative whole. They are a fleeting Trail that only attentive gases perceive as a sign.
Trailer - Installation version
INSIDE
The work occurs in an inflatable structure that proposes new spatial experiences. Needing feeding by air, its continuous activation gives life to the constructed setting. In a multidisciplinary setting, the body coexists and is limited by space. Contained in the same metaphorical realm, a playful world is offered, seeking to awaken in the viewer new symbolic imaginaries. Its analogy with the natural environment addresses different ways of bondi a mass of bodies within a space, the result of the sum of individualities, shows the interaction, mutation, and dialogue, concepts that appear in the "collective I” of Dentro (Inside)
Trailer - Site specific version in the Bienal of Sao Paulo
POSTWAR
Work selected by the Biennale di Danza di Venezia 2024
POSTWAR is a multidisciplinary immersion into the post-war body, combining performing arts, visual arts, live music and film.
Through a network of live streaming cameras, another visible universe is generated: a multiverse. Perspectives in parallel to the stage action are captured from the bodies themselves and from subjective angles.
This project dives into an ephemeral territory, where the body becomes the battlefield, resisting both the exterior and itself. It embodies the utopia of a promising future emerging from the ruins of a lost war. It is a physical, intimate and global state, which aspires to find alternative answers in the face of uncertainty, disorientation and alienation. A geographical space is created by a multiplicity of bodies in constant resistance and reconstruction.
Photos (taken in the editorial office of Anfibia magazine. This newsroom was destroyed by a fire in 2024 and is in the process of reconstruction)