Peeping Tom | La visita

Reggio Emilia, November 4 – 7, 2021

a project for Fondazione I Teatri di Reggio Emilia and Collezione Maramotti
winner of the 2021 Fedora – Van Cleef & Arpels Prize for Ballet

La Visita, a site-specific project by Peeping Tom commissioned and produced by Fondazione I Teatri in partnership with Collezione Maramotti and with the support of Max Mara, will premiere on Thursday 4 November 2021 at 8:30 pm at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia. Presented as part of the Aperto Festival, there will be repeat performances on Friday 5 November, at 8:30 pm, Saturday 6 November, at 4 and 7 pm, and Sunday 7 November at 4 pm. La Visita is the winner of the 2021 Fedora – Van Cleef & Arpels Prize for Ballet, which singles out the best new projects in the field of international dance.

"The jury was impressed by the high quality of ‘La Visita’ and its unique approach of involving local communities while blurring the lines between art forms." Nicholas Payne, Director of Opera Europa and Chair of the Jury of the FEDORA - VAN CLEEF & ARPELS Prize for Ballet 2021

For years now, museums and art galleries have played an important role in the surreal, perturbing work of Peeping Tom: their performance Moeder (2016) was set in a space that became a maternity ward, funeral home, recording booth and art gallery, as if the whole of life were presented there for everyone to see. For the spaces of the Collezione Maramotti, choreographer Gabriela Carrizo has taken the opposite approach, bringing the theatrical work of Peeping Tom inside a contemporary art collection.

The protagonists of La Visita – which appear to include members of the Collezione Maramotti staff, such as guards and cleaning personnel – move through the exhibition space and interact with the art; at the same time, the artworks seem to spring to life along with the characters who inhabit them. Viewers are gradually led into a parallel world where the museum, a place entrusted with preserving things over time, must deal with what is ephemeral and transitory. The audience too must rise to the challenge, posing themselves the task of distinguishing reality from fiction, art from everyday life.

“When my mother, who was a painter – she loved to paint – passed away, my sisters and I decided that her paintings should be there at her memorial service. We soon realized how one’s view of things changes, how the gaze is transformed: these paintings suddenly contained new colours, the forms and figures took on new meanings or showed us something we had never noticed when they were shining on the walls of my mother’s house, a house full of joy. That was the inspiration for Moeder.
The project titled La Visita sprang from the idea of bringing the characters from Moeder, or other works by Peeping Tom, into a new setting. It is as if they have moved, with all their stories and memories, into a new house where they can live other lives. These are characters who for many months – due to the pandemic – have remained silent, motionless or slumbering, but have always been there waiting. The guard, his wife (the exhibition guide) and the cleaners. Key figures in any museum, they are in some sense silent; serving the place and its visitors, they are also ghosts in disguise whose secret impulses unfold before us. The works of art on view are also witnesses, sometimes silent, sometimes not. We hear their comments or laments and all of this plunges us into a new space, where artworks become new traces of life.” (Gabriela Carrizo)

In the same week (on 6 November at 8:30 pm and 7 November at 6 pm), Peeping Tom will also be at Teatro Municipale Valli – again, as part of the Aperto Festival – to present another of the Belgian company’s most important works, Triptych: The missing door, The lost room and The hidden floor. In this trilogy, cinematically constructed as if it were a live montage, Carrizo and Chartier explore their characters’ inner worlds and summon up a disturbing, claustrophobic universe. The performance will also be accessible to blind and partially sighted people through audio introduction and description services from WordUp Team. Festival Aperto, along with Oriente Occidente and Torinodanza, is taking part in Europe Beyond Access, a programme which promotes accessibility and inclusion in the performing arts, supported by Creative Europe with Associazione Fedora.