Periferico Festival 2023

The intelligence of fungi and their ability to relate to each other interest us and ignite our imagination. They help us describe art practice as a relational and symbiotic system, a powerful field of experimentation for transforming our rigid criteria of distinction between "my end and your beginning" and for shaping new perspectives of intra-action between people and collectivity. Relying on the desire to transfer this dynamic of life and energy from below to above, Presente! 2023 traced its dimension in the invisible paths traversed over the months of work between communities, places, territories and works. This 15th edition of the festival was articulated as an extended reticular programme of performative actions rooted in the city of Modena and designed to devise new forms of complicity between artists and urban environments, participants, and publics. Presente! 2023 gave space to immersive, nomadic, and disorienting works that often require the active presence of neighbourhood residents and groups of people of all ages and backgrounds in order to happen, and that allow participants to experience the perception of multiple perspectives simultaneously.

Periferico mobilised an idea of a fluid and polycentric city, at the pace of walking and cycling, in a relaxed time in which distances are bridged one step at a time. A festival that has always reverberated in other spaces: it invents listening places in the squares, stops to contemplate the metaphysical architecture of a cemetery, echoes in the echo of the vaulted ceiling of an artisan's workshop, observes the passage of time seemingly motionless in the heart of industrial decommissioning, beats in the heart of a lonely woman walking down the street at night, climbs the ramps of an old apartment building that reminds us of a time when the combination of social housing and urban quality founded new narratives of living. Presente! 2023 emerged in the places of the city, like the fruiting body of a mushroom after the branching exploration of its mycelium underground.

Investigated for the second year by the festival as a sphere for the development of hosted actions, the horizon of vocality is revealed as a political proposition in which the city is inhabited no longer by autonomous and self-sufficient individuals in search of something to bind them, but "already bound by an acoustic dialogue that takes its cadences at the very rhythm of breathing" in the words of Adriana Cavarero. As fungi and plants establish mycorrhizal (i.e., symbiotic) relationships by singing the same metabolic "song" that no one could sing alone, Presente! 2023 is traversed by numerous choruses in which vital questions about our possibility of learning to conceive of ourselves as both one and multiple, joyfully accepting the tangle of our shared existences.