Artist in residence Emma Dotti
Installation of drawings and performance.
Three objects between a circus and an orthopedic tools, text, and an audio piece with translation and voice by Emanuela Ascari.
31 July 2026
Every morning, Emma wakes up and looks out her window at a stork’s nest, which is also captured by a camera installed so that anyone can log on online to watch them.
Over the past fifty years, the white stork in Romania has gradually moved its nest from house chimneys and trees to power poles. Their survival now depends on infrastructure designed for an entirely different purpose, and the nest has become a meeting point between animals and technology.
This research takes this shift as its starting point to explore how we create the conditions through which we organize our coexistence with other species. The inside and the outside, the domestic and the wild, tradition and innovation… these cease to be fixed categories and become relationships that are constantly redefined.
The exhibition invites visitors to enter an enclosure. Some wooden planks demarcate and separate public and private spaces, becoming supports for drawings that alternate between observation and imagination: real scenes, encountered during explorations of the territory, transform into compositions in which postures, bodies, and architecture mutually influence one another, shaping new alliances and continuous shifts between human and non-human bodies.
A sculptural object, halfway between a circus prop, the rola bola (designed so that balance is constantly lost and regained through a series of continuous micro- adjustments) and an orthopedic board, used by the artist daily for ankle exercise- brings this oscillation to a physical plane. This object, produced in three different versions and covered with traditional rugs, also evokes those threshold spaces between one room and another, places of passage where one is invited to linger, compelling those who use them to experience with their own bodies that condition of precariousness inherent to the human condition and which the acrobat makes into a matter of identity.
Acrobatics, in this case, is considered a practice of connection rather than virtuosity: it allows the human to be transformed, to temporarily relinquish its own posture, and to inhabit instability. Balance is not the same as control, but rather to the continuous capacity to let things flow, adapt, and embrace the possibility of falling.
During the event, the artist activated the objects, subsequently leaving them available to the public, transforming the enclosure into a space of coexistence and play, where infrastructure, animals, and human bodies continuously redefine the possibilities for being together.
TEXT of the performance