Sparks 2021 is a performance preceded by a workshop and from which an installation, autonomous in its expressive, evocative and documenting capabilities, ensues.

The project is part of the artist’s practice of investigation of the concept of body and is deeply tied to the interlacing of different disciplines. Differing from earlier projects (performances, videos, sculptures and drawings) where the body is evidence of the resistance to life, to time and to the forces of decline, Sparks 2021 – a spin-off of the 2015 video work Faster than light – focuses on the overturning of the power relation between child and adult. Sparks 2021 is based on a small but revolutionary action: consigning in the hands of children the reading of our future as a gesture of hope and rupture with the past. After some days of workshop together with the poet Azzurra D’Agostino, a group of local children accompanies adults inside a space, where they can read their hands, one at a time and once only, thus activating an open revelatory and interpretative process, where they are themselves the makers of visions and reflections.

The entire performance is based on 3 elements: the hands – in a time when contact is negated – our most exposed body parts, visible testimony of our body and point of contact between different generations; the hand reading, used by the children as a game to express their imagination and desires; the cap-sculptures as a playful echo of elms, but once worn by the children they mark the beginning of the performance as they shield the children from the direct gaze of the adults. The project Sparks, as developed in its final version, includes and transforms physical distance into an element of strength. 

Sparks 2021 therefore transforms light into an element of intangible transmission which augments childhood’s illuminating power – the sparks – and cloaks in magic the balance of a shared game. 

The audience will enter the space one by one, they won’t be allowed to talk, but just listen to the child. Every time the child will finish the reading, another person will be invited to join the space of the performance.
​​Finally, the installation of Sparks 2021 is made by caps/elms scattered in the space by the children – on the floor, the walls and on the benches, which functions as tools for the games and breaks during the performance – and of a sound track created from the recordings of the imaginative predictions of the children.