I was invited to take part in the On Mobilisation project to implement the project Special Handling within Lavanderia a Vapore, with possibly an action of engagement of the communities in Collegno.

Special Handling was built in 2021 in a specific neighbourhood of Milano, searching for what could be a collection of so called ‘invisibilized knowledge’ through a system of barter: I was offering free massages in exchange for something people could teach. The research project took many months of encounters with different women. The result was a one-to-one performance, located in a tent built during the process and the intention was to create a collection of invisibilized knowledge encountered in the encounter with local people in different territories.

After applying the project in two different cities and the presentation of the performance as a performative collection in a few venues, there was a strong urge of going back to the research question with a critical approach to re-shape a few elements. 

Some questions appeared with the time:

• how to recognize and grab a kind of knowledge which is invisibilized?
• Is the definition of ‘invisibilized’ another way of underlying the hierarchy between different kinds of knowledge? (this consideration is especially relevant when the project was created in relation with women with a migrant background with the risk of approaching them too much through the perspective of their vulnerability)

Due to those doubts inherent in the core research question, I felt that the invitation in the  process, offered to the people encountered in different territories, was not well defined and clear. Moreover a big amount of time was needed in order to negotiate with each person what could be the knowledge they want to transmit. The time was needed also to search and build one-to-one relations in every territory.

I’ve been developing my artistic practice, thinking that the time invested in the creation of relations in a site is a crucial part of the artistic process. What was happening with Special Handling was that the project was too unbalanced towards the creation of the relations, missing the part of artistically processing the action created with those relations. This observation opened up two questions. On one hand how much space the work of engagement of people in the process has. A topic which is strongly related with the amount of commitment of care towards people. On the other hand maybe this off balance of the project towards creating relations, suggested that relations themselves are an artistic and more specifically choreographic element. 

Moreover, I didn’t feel very happy with the performative outcome with this massive work of relation. The outcome consisted in a one-to-one performance inviting people to enjoy some element of the collection of knowledge. I felt some point of criticality with the idea of collection: which is the element of a knowledge that you put in a collection?  Is that enough representation of knowledge? What’s knowledge without the context where it is situated? Why am I collecting for?  Is there a choreographic dynamic in a collection? Is there space for learning and transmitting knowledge in a collection?

A list of ever emerging questions brought me to realise that I’m not really fascinated with the idea of collection but much more with the possibility of creating the situation and condition where  knowledge rises. Against the static quality of a taxonomic organisation of knowledge, I rather was called by the choreographic and dynamic quality of managing the possibility of making things happen. 

In the middle of the process of re-thinking Special Handling, together with Chiara Organtini and Daniele Ninnarello, we had to co-curate the Evening School on Care. The Evening School on Care and especially the Suk of Knowledges, where some people of Collegno were invited to share their knowledge/skill/experience, triggered my interest in a situation of co-existence in the same space of point of relation where a kind of knowledge can emerge. People of Collegno invited were sitting at their own table, each of them encountering one person in the audience at the time. What was happening was not just a transmission of knowledge from the invited local person to the person of the audience but rather a negotiation of something in between: another kind of knowledge in the intra-action of the two people.