Practice as research

I am an artist and writer coming from performance. For fourteen years, I was part of Compagnia della Fortezza, a theatre company working inside Volterra prison, where I lived and practiced theatre as a daily encounter with limits, bodies, time, and imagination. That experience continues to shape my work, not as something to be documented, but as a way of listening, writing, and staying with what resists easy narration.

My writing practice grows out of performative processes and workshops I have developed and led over the past decade in prisons, schools, and other unconventional spaces. These practices investigate how storytelling emerges from constraint and how language becomes a shared space rather than a fixed form. Writing, for me, is always embodied and relational, porous to the contexts in which it takes place.

Current Research — Someplace, Somewhere

My current writing and research project, Someplace, Somewhere, originates from the notebooks and fragments written during my years inside the prison. With time and distance, this archival work condensed into a work of fiction.

Rather than recounting events or individual biographies, the project follows what remained after leaving: the experience of living within limits, the persistence of imagination under constraint, and the way relationships continue to generate meaning beyond closed systems. Fiction became the form that allowed this experience to stay alive.

Someplace, Somewhere is a performative writing novel in three parts, currently in its final stages of development.

It began with a notebook. Inside it, fragments of memory: the story of a theatre company in a prison, the bond between two children, in a climate-abused future, in a forested refugee camp, and a the love of becoming a mirror, of seeing the whole world and oneself in the other

But this novel isn’t only written. It is being lived.

The third part of the book is unfolding now, through the voices and bodies of people who take part in a series of performative writing workshops across Europe and online. These workshops are not just a tool—they are the narrative device. Each participant contributes reflections, memories, fragments, and gestures that will echo within the final arc of the book.

This is writing as a shared ritual. A dialogue between fiction and experience, solitude and collective resonance.

Themes

• Isolation and connection
  
• Identity and memory
  
• Care, listening, and the art of mirroring
  
• Forgiveness as an embodied act
  
• Thresholds, and transformation
  

An invitation

This is not a solitary act of authorship. Someplace, Somewhere is an invitation.

Through performative writing—rooted in time-bound intuitive composition, guided embodiment, and shared reading—we create a living third part of the story. The novel becomes a space where your voice, your memories, your images may find form and be remembered.

Methodology: Writing as Collective Practice

• Guided writing sessions (timed, intuitive, judgment-free)
• Embodiment and breathing exercises
• Story-based collective narration
• Collection of participant fragments (with consent)
  

How to take part

Workshops are open to all who feel called to explore writing as a gesture of connection. No previous writing experience is needed—only the willingness to listen, to breathe, to remember.

Upcoming sessions will be announced.

Interested in hosting a workshop, contributing to the novel, or publishing the work?

Write to: info@scritturaperformativa.com