Associazione Mercurio and Fabbrica Bini present
Don’t Fight The Feelings
Performance by Martina Rota
Curated by spazioSERRA
On invitation by Cloe Piccoli
Wednesday, December 13, 2023, starting at 7:30 PM
Fabbrica Bini, Viale Giovanni da Cermenate, 18 – Milan
On Wednesday, December 13, from 7:30 PM to 10:30 PM, Associazione Mercurio and Fabbrica Bini invite the audience to an evening to explore the theme of emotional fragility through the viewing of the performance Don’t Fight The Feelings by Martina Rota. Free admission with mandatory registration on Eventbrite, subject to seat availability.
The site-specific intervention is curated by spazioSERRA on the invitation of Cloe Piccoli, a reference point in contemporary art criticism and curation. It is a response to the invitation of Associazione Mercurio, which has been committed since 2014 to supporting schools in Milan and Lombardy in combating school dropout and educational poverty, urging everyone to listen to their inner world and the emotions of those around us. It's a stimulus that Mercurio considers essential and brings into classrooms every day, in schools of all levels, through its educational programs.
Martina Rota presents Don’t Fight The Feelings, the third chapter of the series that began with I Can Still Taste You (Archivio ViaFarini, 2020) and continued with Don’t Fuck With My Hunger (spazioSERRA, 2021). It's a choreographic-installation performance that reflects on the concepts of unity, relationship, and trust as training for uncertainty—a way to question how one can cohabit a space in constant change. The site-specific work brings a metagym inside Fabbrica Bini, composed of five poles that blend into the environment while modifying its architecture. Ten performers, young students from the Tito Livio Choreographic High School in Milan, and hundreds of ice popsicles come together in a loop of construction and deconstruction, constantly changing the rules of coexistence through the code of improvisation.
"How do we inhabit space after a catastrophe?" explains Martina Rota. "What happens to the body and the attitudes we adopt? (...) Suddenly, a community finds itself interacting with a space in total improvisation. When we were prehistoric, we had already done it, we were more accustomed to inhabiting different spaces, we moved. The attitude of listening, dialogue, change, movement, uncertainty, are all skills that our bodies have and need to be brought back to ourselves and among us."
The artistic proposal is part of the event organized by Associazione Mercurio to support "La Palestra delle Emozioni" (The Emotions Gym), an educational project aimed at the psycho-emotional well-being of young people and the enhancement of bodily expression.
Martina Rota (Bergamo, Italy, 1995) is an artist active in the world of visual and performing arts. She currently works as a performer, choreographer, movement director, and Dance well teacher. Martina is the co-founder of MASSIMO, an independent contemporary art space established in 2019 along with Giulia Parolin and Stefano Galeotti, and EXPANDING MOVEMENT, dance and movement workshops open to the community. Her interdisciplinary artistic research explores the desires and traumas of the body in a personal and collective dimension. Martina sees her work as an opportunity to create relationships with space, ask questions, and reflect on common feelings. She began her artistic journey at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where she graduated in the Visual Arts department, simultaneously training in dance in Italy and Europe.
Cloe Piccoli
Art critic and curator, Cloe Piccoli is a full-time professor of Contemporary Art at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. Her work spans projects at various levels: from conception to strategic planning, to creating partnerships between public and private institutions. She has a wide network of national and international relationships with museums, foundations, galleries, artists, architects, designers, museum directors, curators, critics, collectors, and journalists. She writes about art and architecture for La Repubblica and D of Repubblica.
Associazione Mercurio
Association Mercurio is a cultural and social promotion association active in Milan and Lombardy since 2014. The association supports public schools with the aim of contributing to the fight against educational poverty, school dropout, and abandonment, offering equal opportunities for growth and inclusion to children and young people from fragile categories and disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds.
Fabbrica Bini
A former factory from the 1930s located in the Stadera district and the former Milanese headquarters of Superga, Fabbrica Bini is one of the examples of great industrial architecture hidden in the courtyards of Milan. Fabbrica Bini was born in 2021 from a project by Gentucca Bini and her growing need to create a place where the entire creative process, from idea to design to prototyping, to distribution and communication, could be made independent.