Pina Danila Gambettola

Pina Danila Gambettola is a dancer, performer and researcher dedicated to a transdisciplinary exploration aimed at expanding the boundaries of choreography by integrating movement, voice, sonic research and installation components. Her investigation unfolds on both theoretical and practical levels within a speculative space rooted in the body. Drawing on imagery inspired by Southern Italy,  her approach investigates a performative presence that moves fluidly between public and private spaces, as well as between the ritual and the everyday life elements.

Pina lives between Calabria, Amsterdam and Venice, where she worked as a performer for The Soul Expanding Ocean #2: Isabel Lewis at Ocean Space, for Alexandra Pirici’s Encyclopedia of Relations at the Biennale Arte 2022 and for the exhibition Bruce Nauman, Contrapposto studies at Punta della Dogana. She graduated in Theatre and Performing Arts at Iuav in Venice, where after the graduation she worked as teaching assistant. Her recent works Cu*mmia*1 and /EUSAPIA!$PLZ COME BACK TO ME, FAC!&K!£$LOMBROSO*2  has been presented at Guggenheim Venice, BASE Milan, In-ruins (Matera), SPORE residency (ATCL e Festival Medioera di Viterbo in partnership with Short Theatre and IUAV University), Spazio Rossellini Rome (Short Theatre festival), Spazio Punch Venice.

With her new work ***The((%%$Third((///(secret(/&%bodies/&/%***3 she has been selected for the Live Works fellowship 2025/2026 at Centrale Fies.

At DAS Pina is researching on a theoretical, practical and methodological project in which a performative presence explores the transformative and reparative potential of the counterculture of magic, from the point of view of a specific Mediterranean’s territory, Southern Italy and in particular the Calabria region. The project is a speculative space of alternative dance and voice practices and aesthetics of the body that work between the real and the imaginative, and based on remembering the magic with the desire to embody the political and social power of movement, grounded in forms of knowledge that can be understood as alternatives to the main colonial western culture. Focusing on trance, betweeness and magic materialism, the research works on the boundaries of the visible and the invisible, exploring the multiple states of a presence that travels through time, science fiction, mesmerism and techno culture. Assuming a decolonial perspective linked to the internal Italian racism, in particular it’s the invisibility topic that creates the connections between the various disciplines, which from an oppressive and controlling condition becomes a generating power of healing and resistance through imaginative and somatic movement. The methodology connects the anthropological field with the languages of performing art, in particular dance in relation to sound and installation, and the interrelationships produced by transfeminist queer theories and by affect’s studied.