La Volata - She flies (out of her body not her mind)

wild ceremonies, generous offerings and rituals of passage - was a day of programme that took place on 21st July 2023, starting under tree shadows in the early afternoon and closing with the lights of the stars late in the evening.
The occasion was manifold: a summer celebration in our house, ritualistically closing a season and regenerating for the next, and choosing to do so in connection to an ancient popular Italian feast, A Vuláta, the feast of madness, literally meaning in the Calabrian dialect "flying out of her mind". This festivity joins us in Florence from the deep South of Italy, coming particularly from historical times of Paola and San Lucido, two municipalities of the lower Tyrrhenian Sea. As every popular feast not just invented for marketing purposes, she too has had many incarnations throughout the past century, differently shaped and stretched by the ideologies and histories of her transforming times. In Florence, for us, La Volata embodies the occasion to grapple with diverse fugitive practices and collective rituals of passages, resistance and escape, but also and especially with collective force and work of communities surviving through journeys of solidarity. We choose to invoke her as a metaphor of catharsis, with her healing power of encouraging to temporarily fly out of everyday states of consciousness.

LA VOLATA - SHE FLIES is a night of conviviality, where music, food, performativity and dancing will be enacted as collective emancipatory exercises to weave together traditional knowledges from territories of the Italian South and their transformation with migrations to Germany together with the experimental artistic research currently unfolding in the house.

Among the guests participating in the celebrations: Antonia Alampi, Maurizio Alampi, the collective of Archive Ensemble, Jeanette Bisschops, Nando Brusco, Robert Machiri (Listening to Pungwe), Doris Maninger, Emeka Ogboh, Neda Saeedi, Tomás Saraceno, Lynhan Balatbat, Aerocene, Maxi Llaina, and many more.

The event is curated by Villa Romana in conversation with Antonia Alampi.

Programme

17:30
INTRODUCTIONS
Calling
Elena Agudio, Mistura Allison, Antonia Alampi

17:45 - 18:00
CHOREOGRAPHY
Introduction to La Volata
Maurizio Alampi
followed by
Drum Session
Nando Brusco

18:00 - 18:20
Libations
Dance of Oya

18:30 - 19:00
Reading / Lecture
Jeanette Bisschops - Hunting for Ghosts

19:15 - 20:00
Performances and Offerings
Archive Ensemble
Savanna M. Morgan

20:15
Offering at the barbecue

21:00 - 22:00
Nando Brusco

22:00 - till late
DJ Line Up
Listening to Pungwe
Lynhan Balatbat
Emeka Ogboh

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