Elisabetta Consonni choreographs everything, human and inhuman beings, mobile and immobile objects, maps, interstices and spatial holiday groups. She weaves networks of relationships, subtle and strong, like sugar glass. Her works for conventional spaces aim to expand the practice of choreography seeking for performative devices to incorporate a social discourse.

Elisabetta’s activism in the social and civic sphere, takes the artistic form of a research process which, since 2013, investigates the use and social meaning of public space and the declination of choreographic skills in working with communities. Her work searches for the continuous interlacing between practice and production of knowledge through body practices.

During the ON MOBILISATION project Elisabetta is developing a platform for the emergence of hidden or invisibilized knowledges, titled Special Handling. The artistic research reflects on a possibility of undermining the hierarchies of power inherent within the structure of knowledge. The categorical, Western structure of knowledge excludes not only other kinds of knowledge, magical and occult, which an eighteenth-century philosophy definitively banned, but also non-Western traditions of knowledge and all that body of knowledge which is invisible because the people who hold it are invisible. The project goes in search of knowledge defined as such by an artistic process of relationship and practice, reflecting on who has the right to transmit knowledge. The idea is based on a concept of care as a dimension of knowledge circulation and multiplication of relationships built around doing together.

Special Handling is a path of encounter and collaboration with individuals or groups of people who are offered a massage or body practice, through the formula: “I offer you a massage, can you teach me something?”.