Activities —

HOW TO BECOME A PLATYPUS – Elisabetta Consonni

Residency

January 23, 2024 - May 31, 2024 Lavanderia a VaporeTorino

Artistic Residency: ELISABETTA CONSONNI
Lavanderia a Vapore, Collegno, Torino, Italy
Period I. January 23 – January 25, 2024
Period II. February 12 – February 22, 2024
Period III. March 11 – March 21, 2024
Period IV. May 20 – May 31, 2024

In 2024 Lavanderia hosted the artistic research of Elisabetta Consonni, and facilitated a development of the ongoing project “Special Handling” that finally generated a new performative device: “How to become a Platypus”.

“Special Handling” sparkled as research on invisible knowledge owned by people often marginalised: in the specific context that originated the project, a park in a multicultural area of Milan, this knowledge was mostly related to physical practices held by female migrants. Since then, Consonni has been questioning what knowledge is and how the acknowledgment and legitimation of it is determined by a political act of supremacy that enforces privileges.

In 2024 in Lavanderia, she shifted the research question from the invisible knowledge to the possibility of giving up control to let knowledge emerge by doing and by surprise, as an alchemy born from the mixture and encounters among different agents, human and not, present in a common space. In the first weeks of residency, she focused on redefining the theme of the long- term research from invisible knowledge to embodied knowledge. The collective artistic research process was based on somatic, experience based practices, with the dramaturgical support of Silvia Bottiroli.

In the following residencies, she engaged two artistic collaborators, the former professor and researcher Alessandro Tollari and the dancer Barbara Stimoli, to co-create situations and games that could trigger collective experiences in which cultivating knowledge and expertise but also playing games that challenge authority and individuality, while fostering fate and collaboration. During March Consonni tested the prototyped device with young students form Curie High Schools and with a group of dancers and community workers involving also a group of elderly people from care houses connected to Lavanderia a Vapore.

From these shared sessions, Consonni refined the performative score and premiered the work publicly during the International Symposium On Mobilisation of Care at Lavanderia a Vapore.

“How to become a platypus” is currently a constellation of practices/exercises where the audience is invited to participate by following a different path for each person. The different stations invite to a derailment from logic; pleasant missions impossible to go and intercept some personal aspects of knowledge that refuses functionality. Attention is displaced and surprised; what we consider our knowledge loses balance, leaving room for intuitions or knowledge that one did not believe to be such. The environment is a training to free a part of one’s knowledge from having a utility, and the criteria that place one knowledge at the centre and the others at the margins are thus skipped.

In the vertigo of not knowing, possibilities open and worlds are created: even the platypus becomes possible.