La nube que nada
The cloud that swims

Keywords: collaborative poetry, dystopian future, site-specific performance, interactive monologue

Direction - Carlo Sella
Dramaturgy - Carlo Galiero
Production - Arraiga, lab of rooted imagination

Performed in
Luarca, Spain
Contemporary culture international festival
La FAVORITA de Xuan Bello 2025

The cloud that swims is a site-specific performance conceived as a tribute to the Asturian writer Xuan Bello, who passed away in July 2025. The piece enters into direct dialogue with his literary legacy, especially his celebrated Historia universal de Paniceiros.
In this book, Bello evokes a timeless Asturian imagination, where memory, myth, and identity intertwine. Among its passages appears the image of a man who travels across the centuries in search of Christ, only to finally discover that he himself was Christ. This paradoxical gesture, seeking what already dwells within, served as the inspiration for the dramaturgical structure of our piece.

The performance begins from a speculative premise: in the future, poetry has been lost. A man travels through different eras, attempting to rediscover its meaning, guided by the voices of poets and fragments of memory. His journey culminates in present-day Asturias, in Luarca during the days of the festival, where he has heard that poetry is alive and in motion.
By inviting the community to respond, the performance turns the audience into co-creators: the man of the future cannot understand poetry unless it is collectively reimagined in the here and now.

Guardare indietro al futuro
Looking back to the future

Creative ethnography laboratory

Keywords: transgenerational, agroecological knowledge, reminescence theatre, ethnography, collaborative zine-making

Concept - Shiftslow Collective 
Emma Marzi, Carlo Sella, Catarina Simão, Vlio Velema

Hosted by - La Foresta Accademia di Comunità

In the frame of the EU-funded artistic residency project S4T (Station for Transformation)

Link to the zine

Looking back to the future is an transdisciplinary, intergenerational art project carried out during the residency of the ShiftSlow collective at the community hub La Foresta, in Rovereto (Northern Italy). The project brought together ten elders from the Vallagarina Valley, holders of agroecological knowledge and life experience rooted in the local fields and landscapes, and ten young participants interested in reimagining sustainable futures for the area’s rurality. The central question guiding the project was:

How can we rediscover and share the situated knowledge of Vallagarina in order to imagine a fairer agro-food system?

Over the past seventy years, the valley’s political-ecological landscape has undergone deep transformations: intensive monocultures of apples and grapes, the construction of large hydroelectric dams, and an accelerated consumption of land have reshaped the territory, erasing part of its identity. The project explored the dialogue between three temporal dimensions – past, present, and future – by documenting fading ecological knowledge, reframing it in the present, and co-creating future imaginaries rooted in a shared heritage. The activities were designed not to produce definitive answers, but to create the conditions for visions to emerge – connecting stories and desires, biographies and landscapes, material practices and speculative thinking. Informal moments, such as cooking and eating together, exchanging recipes, or sharing spontaneous stories, became equally important spaces for memory activation and community bonding. As a final outcome, we produced a zine publication functioning as a small affective and graphic archive of the process. Rather than a linear document, it offers a mosaic of images, words, and gestures, serving both as a record and as inspiration for similar initiatives elsewhere.

La sombra que deja el hilo
The shadow left by the thread 

Ethnographic performative project

Keywords: transgenerational, elders women, memory, ethnographic theatre, dystopian future, collective care, performative archiving

Ideation and project diretion - Carlo Sella
Dramaturgy - Carlo Galiero
Archive project - Catarina de Simão
Production - Mari Edgar
Production assistance - Amaia Rodriguez Parrado, Ines David Cieutat
Pictures and videos - Francesco Bignardi, Francesco Flora
Costumes - Valentina Perini
Ethnographic supervision -  Nuria Timmermann
Graphic supervision - Vlio Velema

An Arraiga, lab of rooted imagination project
Hosted by - Sala Polivalente de Montbau, Espai Jove Palau Alòs
With the support of - Culture Moves Europe 2024

La sombra que deja el hilo (the shadow left by the thread) is a participatory theatre project created after a long-term, patchwork ethnographic process with elder women (most of them working-class immigrants) living in the Montbau neighborhood of Barcelona. This collaboration became the foundation for a site-specific performance format that is reactivated in each new location through a three-day memory and theatre lab with local elder women. Their voices, reflections, and lived knowledge are the dramaturgical engine of the piece. The dramaturgical framework weaves together lived memories with speculative fiction. The material shared in the workshops is transported into a dystopian future where older women are persecuted unless they are considered “useful.” This imagined scenario exposes the underlying logic of turbocapitalism, a system that denies care, punishes fragility, and erases those who cannot be measured by productivity. At its core, the project is an act of collective re-inscription. It creates a space for elder women to revisit their personal histories, confront cultural silence, and occupy public space through performance. The resulting piece functions as both a political fable and a counter-archive, insisting on the enduring presence and knowledge of those who have often been rendered invisible. Watch the trailer here.