DAS Theatre has invited Silvia Bottiroli to curate the Block Anywhere, Anywhere Out of This World, a ten week study programme. Philippe Quesne, Christophe Meierhans, Zapruder, Mårten Spångberg, Daniel Blanga-Gubbay and Livia Andrea Piazza are some of the guest teachers who will be working with the students.

Anywhere, Anywhere Out of The World is the title of an exhibition by artist Philippe Parreno at Palais de Tokyo in 2013, but this sentence first appeares, just slightly different, in a short text by Charles Baudelaire, where the poet imagines a dialogue between him and his soul about the desire or obsession to move and change his position, in life and within the world. ‘It seems to me that I should always be happier elsewhere than where I happen to be, and this question of moving is one that I am continually talking over with my soul’, writes Baudelaire, who asks several times to his soul where she’d like to go. He proposes Lisbon, even Holland, and other more exotic and tempting destinations, but doesn’t get any answer till the moment where the soul finally cries out ‘Anywhere, anywhere, as long as it be out of this world!’.

As an invitation to move anywhere, anywhere out of this world, the DAS Theatre block is a call to a journey into the territories of fiction, of the fantastic, the imaginative, the utopian, the invisible. A call to experiment a radical imagination: to let go to the so called reality, the world as we know it, and to dive into fictional universes, beyond critique and pure fantasy and towards an attitude of prefiguration.

In fact, art is the realm where narratives are produced and shared; where different worlds are imagined and navigated; and where reality is traversed with a spirit of attentiveness to what is not there, to what is not present but possible – which is to say, to what is merely present as a possibility. Claiming the potentiality of fiction also implies a leap of faith into art as a form of reflection and speculation that has a value per se and that doesn’t necessarily generate something else, yet has a strong bound to the construction and the institution of reality.

Liberated from any function and disconnected from a binary relationship with the existing narratives, fiction becomes thus a space for radical imaginal practices, and the art school a frame where it’s possible to shape the current and future world and nurture an individual and collective capacity to cultivate hope and to think the world anew.

The block will be articulated into different axes, developping complementary trajectories of this research question, and is conceived and designed in dialogue with some artists and guests, who will lead them and propose different kinds of practices, forms of reflection, devices and adventures. The dramaturgy of the ten weeks is conceived in order to allow the participants to dive into some artists’ worlds, theoretical landscapes and practice, and to navigate them as a whole, following different waves, letting them encounter our path, creating interferences.

Silvia Bottiroli is a contemporary performing arts curator and researcher, and also mentor of the block Anywhere, Anywhere Out of This World. Phd in Visual and Performing Arts at the Pisa University, she is author of numerous writings about the XX Century and contemporary theatre and dance scene, focusing in particular on the political and ethical values of performance, the societal implication of artistic creation and spectatorship and the issues raised by curatorial practices and instituting processes. From 2012 to 2016 Bottiroli has been the artistic director of Santarcangelo Festival, one of the most relevant contemporary performing arts festivals in Italy.

In the frame of the block 'Anywhere, Anywhere Out of This World', a series of seminars with contemporary performing and visual arts curators are held at DAS Theatre, in order to confront some issues about curating, rethinking or imagining art institutions, and creating spaces for collaboration between art organizations and artists.

The seminars are intended as a moment of sharing, debate and work triggered each time by the presence, thoughts, questions and concerns of one figure. The guests are asked in particular to explore –with students and participants– how their curatorial practice is affected by the notion of fiction or fictional attitudes and how the curation and production of art projects can cope with the limits of the possible. What is the definition of an impossible or utopian project? How does curating set conditions for the impossible to happen? What space of sharing or overlapping practices exists or can be created between art institutions and artists?